Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

BREAKING

UPDATE: SAS pilots extend strike talks until midday on Monday

Pilot unions in Sweden, Denmark and Norway have agreed to extend talks with the SAS airline until midday on Monday, after a deadline on Saturday passed without a deal. SAS flights scheduled for this weekend will fly as normal.

Published: 2 July 2022 12:10 CEST
Updated: 2 July 2022 16:07 CEST
UPDATE: SAS pilots extend strike talks until midday on Monday
Flight passengers stand at a service point of Scandinavian airline SAS at Terminal 3 of the Copenhagen airport on July 2, 2022, the day a deadline ends for negotiations between SAS airline and pilots threatening strike action. Photo: Claus Bech / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP) Denmark OUT

The Swedish pilots’ union SPF and other unions have been negotiating for weeks, with the deadline for a strike extended from midnight on Friday, to 11am on Saturday morning, and now until midday on Monday.

“We need to sleep, no one has slept with us for a very long time,” SAS’s chief negotiator, Marianne Hernæs, told Sweden’s TT newswire.

“We’ll meet again tomorrow. Now I am going home and sleeping, I have not slept for many hours,” Keld Bækkelund Hansen, leader of the Danish trade union Dansk Metal, told Denmark’s Ritzau newswire. 

Hernæs said that the two sides were still “extremely far away from one another” when it came to their positions. 

On June 9, the pilot unions of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark submitted their notice to strike on June 29th, with the strike then postponed until July 1st, then again until July 2nd, and now until Monday the 4th. If negotiations do not succeed, 900 pilots could go on strike at midnight.

Flights from SAS subsidiaries, SAS Connect, SAS Link, Cityjet Xfly and Air Baltic were unlikely to be directly affected by the pilot strike.

The SAS management and SPF have been in intensive negotiations for several weeks on a new collective agreement.

The Swedish pilot union believes that SAS is circumventing the right to re-employment by using staff from two subsidiaries as temporary labourers. 

Some 560 pilots who were laid off during the pandemic have not been re-employed.

After negotiations continued all night last night, the situation remains unclear but is progressing, according to the chief negotiator.

“We regret this situation we are in but we actually try everything we can,” says Marianne Hernæs.

Harsh criticism

On Friday, Norwegian put heavy pressure on SAS when the Norwegian pilot union threatened to drive the company into bankruptcy.

The Swedish pilot union also sharply criticized SAS’s negotiating position on Friday.

“An employer who tries to organize away from employer responsibility and agreements entered into by starting a letterbox company has nothing to do with the Swedish labor market and lacks justification for existence”, Martin Lindgren, chairman of the SAS section at the Swedish Pilot Association, said in a written comment to TT.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

ECONOMY

Swedish inflation drops below 4 percent for first time in two years

Sweden's consumer price index fell to 3.9 percent in April, reinforcing predictions that the central bank will keep lowering interest rates this year.

Published: 15 May 2024 09:25 CEST
Swedish inflation drops below 4 percent for first time in two years

The yearly inflation rate according to the consumer price index (CPI) was down from 4.1 percent in March, according to number crunchers Statistics Sweden.

Experts had predicted an inflation rate of 4.0 percent, according to Bloomberg.

“The effect of increasing interest rates for household’s mortgages is easing, which can explain the decreasing inflation rate in April,” Statistics Sweden analyst Carl Mårtensson said in a statement.

Inflation measured instead according to the CPIF metric – the consumer price index with interest rate fluctuations taken out of the equation – meanwhile rose slightly from 2.2 to 2.3 percent.

However, that still beats expectations, which had predicted CPIF inflation of 2.4 percent.

YOUR SWEDISH MONEY:

That puts it slightly above the Riksbank’s inflation target of two percent, and experts predicted that Wednesday’s inflation news strengthened the likelihood that the bank will cut interest rates further.

The Riksbank last week slashed Sweden’s so-called policy rate for the first time in eight years.

The policy rate is the central bank’s main monetary policy tool. It decides which rates Swedish banks can deposit in and borrow money from the Riksbank, which in turn affects the banks’ own interest rates on savings, loans and mortgages.

If bank interest rates are high, it’s expensive to borrow money, which means people spend less and as a result inflation drops.

But now that inflation appears to be holding relatively steady around the two percent target, it means that the bank might be able to start lowering the policy rate yet again.

SHOW COMMENTS