Pilots vote for strike action

Pilots working for KLCuk, a subsidiary of the KLM airline, have voted by 128 to nil to take strike action.

Jim McAuslan, general secretary of the BALPA pilots’ union, said it was “a long and pretty awful story of a loyal and professional workforce being badly treated”.

The union said that, compared to colleagues working for the KLM parent company, KLCuk pilots “have been treated as second-class citizens.‘‘ They have been forced to move bases and “threatened with detrimental changes to their pension scheme, refused promotion, endured continuous and routine breaking of agreements and were told that, if they did not attend harmonisation training to harmonise their cockpits with their KLM mainline colleagues, they would be sacked”.

The strike vote at KLCuk, known as AirUK until a takeover by KLM in the 1990s, comes after almost four years of negotiations. Two years ago, KLM merged with Air France to create Air France-KLM, Europe’s largest airline.

McAuslan predicted that the move to transnational airlines would throw up similar challenges. “It does not bode well for the Air France/KLM group merger when a few hundred UK-based pilots cannot be dealt with fairly by KLM.”

As Labour Research went to press, both sides were due to meet with the ACAS conciliation service. But McAuslan warned: “This may now be too late, and prolonging an already delayed situation is not something we will accept.”