France provided yet another example of its inability to change through the two-week long Air France pilots' strike. Traffic should return to normal today, but the damage done by 4,700 pilots who took the country hostage in the hope of thwarting a subsidiary budget airline will take years to repair.
"In two weeks of conflict, they ruined three years of efforts by 90,000 employees of Air France-KLM to balance the company books," the economist Nicolas Baverez wrote in Le Figaro. "The strangulation of Air France-KLM symbolises the stagnation of the French economy."
The strike cost an estimated €300 million, without counting damage to the tourism sector. The airline was supposed to have returned to profitability this year, after a decade of losses. Close to a million passengers were forced to change travel plans. Many switched to Ryanair and EasyJet – the budget airlines whose business ethos the Air France pilots find so objectionable. Those passengers may be lost to Air France forever.
The state remains the largest shareholder in Air France,with a 16 per cent stake. The blue, white and red tricolour livery remain a symbol of the country. “No airline is immortal,” Alexandre de Juniac, Air France’s chief executive, warned halfway through the strike. Commentators cited the demise of Swissair, Sabena and Pan Am.
Air France realised too late that budget airlines are the wave of the future, the only sector of the industry that is growing, accounting for some 40 per cent of flights in Europe. Ryanair carried 83.4 million passengers in the past year; Air France-KLM carried 77.2 million. Ryanair has 300 aircraft in Europe. Transavia, the budget subsidiary that Air France is trying to develop in the face of the pilots' opposition, has 44 planes.
Forced to compete
Air France pilots fear they will be forced to compete with lower-paid Transavia pilots, and that Air France flights will be gradually replaced by Transavia, to save money. An Air France pilot flies up to 25 per cent fewer hours annually, and costs 40 per cent more, than his European counterparts.
Mr de Juniac made the error of admitting early in the strike that plans for Transavia Europe were negotiable. Air France had planned to set up Transavia bases in Lisbon, Porto and Munich, where pay and benefits are lower than in France. The abandonment of the plan was the pilots’ only victory.
The pilots failed to achieve their main demand; that Air France establish a “single contract” with identical pay and benefits for Transavia. To do so would wipe out the profits gained from the budget airline, management said.
Management and pilots ended the strike without reaching agreement. Like Israel and Hamas, they simply suspended the conflict until the next time.
French labour disputes used to pit left-wing, poorly educated workers against patrician bosses. This time, the battle was among the privileged. Juniac is an aristocrat whose ancestor was wounded in Napoleon's Italian campaign. A qualified engineer, he trained at France's most prestigious Grandes Écoles.
The pilots, who are paid up to €196,000 annually, were also perceived as aristocrats. An opinion poll showed that 69 per cent of the public were against the “spoiled brats of the sky.”
When pilots demonstrated outside the National Assembly, they were heckled by Air France ground staff who have suffered the brunt of €1.3 billion in savings and 8,000 job losses. Le Parisien newspaper denounced the pilots' "kamikaze game". Only the communist daily l'Humanité called the strike "useful".
Slow to react
French prime minister
Manuel Valls
was criticised for being too slow to react, then for attempting to intervene. “This strike must stop,” he declared 11 days into the conflict. “This strike is unbearable for passengers . . . unbearable for the company . . . unbearable for the economic activity of the country.”
By the end of the strike, the pilots themselves admitted it would be “suicidal” to continue. That didn’t stop them scuppering the expansion of French-owned Transavia in Europe, or continuing to oppose the development of Transavia in France.
The length of the strike, its clumsy handling by airline management and the government, and the huge cost incurred, reconfirmed France’s image as the last holdout against globalisation.
Millions of Europeans and Americans have resigned themselves to lower wages and standards of living. The French continue to say non. Collectively, they recognise the need for reform. But each time it's attempted, it runs aground on the shoals of narrow, individual interests.