Foreign Forces for Airports: Why the Chaos Never Ends

Employees from abroad should fill the personnel gaps at German airports. But even if, according to the federal government, this support should be quick – the help will probably come too late for the holiday season.

Long queues at the check-ins, bottlenecks at baggage handling – for many travelers, starting their vacation at German airports means chaos and a lot of patience. According to the federal government’s plans, temporary workers from abroad should help to fill the staff gaps at the airports – but this help threatens to come too late for the upcoming wave of travel in the summer holidays.

Frankfurt Airport alone has already announced that it intends to hire “several hundred” temporary workers from abroad. At the same time, however, Fraport expects that the first foreign employees will be able to start work in eight weeks.

Weekly security check

One reason: The procedures for issuing the necessary residence and work permits for the additional employees are to be accelerated. But no compromises should be made in the reliability tests, emphasized Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser at a joint press conference with Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing and Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil. And in Hesse, according to Fraport, such a security check alone takes six weeks.

This means that the reduction in personnel at the airports will probably only be noticeable in August – at a time when the summer holidays have already begun in all federal states. North Rhine-Westphalia was the first to start the long holiday season this week, and the summer holidays officially begin in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Schleswig-Holstein on Monday. Bavaria is the last federal state to go into the holiday season this year – there the school-free weeks start on August 1st.

Thomas Richter, head of the Employers’ Association of Ground Handling Service Providers in Aviation (ABL), also assumed in an interview with the Reuters news agency that the personnel support from abroad could not be used at German airports until August at the earliest. “It doesn’t solve the problem, but it certainly helps,” Richter said. The general manager of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Verkehrsflughäfen (ADV), Ralph Beisel, however, told the dpa news agency that he hoped that the assistants could be ready for action in four weeks.

Massive job cuts in the Corona crisis

An interdepartmental working group was set up by the federal government to implement the accelerated procedures that will allow the foreign aid workers to be deployed in Germany more quickly. But Federal Minister of the Interior Faeser also emphasized that German employers had to meet certain requirements: employees had to be hired directly at standard wages, social dumping and temporary work were not allowed. In addition, “decent accommodation” for the assistants is a prerequisite.

The Federal Government sees the responsibility for the current chaotic conditions at the airports with their operators. Federal Minister of Labor Heil criticized that the industry had failed to “take adequate precautions” despite massive economic aid from the federal government during the corona pandemic. As a result of the travel restrictions in the pandemic, the aviation industry had to cut numerous jobs, and many employees looked for other jobs. According to Fraport alone, around 4,000 jobs were cut during the Corona crisis.

The consequences can now be felt across Europe: airlines are canceling thousands of flights to relieve the overwhelmed system. Lufthansa alone is taking around 3,000 connections at its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich out of the flight plan for the summer. Airline boss Carsten Spohr apologized to the passengers and admitted that after the pandemic crisis, savings “were exaggerated in one place or another”.

Consumer centers call for strengthening of passenger rights

The head of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, accused the traffic light coalition of reacting too late to the bottlenecks at the airports: “Holidaymakers will have to put up with the travel chaos at the airports this summer.”

In view of the massive problems, the Federal Association of Consumer Centers pushed for the strengthening of passenger rights. Marion Jungbluth criticized the fact that the path to compensation is often long for travelers. However, a few clicks should be enough for this and transfers should then come automatically. In addition, the prepayment practice should be abolished. The fact that flights usually have to be paid for in advance can mean a considerable financial risk for customers.

Technical error during software update

But not only the lack of staff causes problems in the work processes at the airports. Air traffic was temporarily restricted over large parts of Germany in the morning. The reason was a disruption when installing a software update at German air traffic control. At their center in Langen near Frankfurt, controllers control the lower airspace in central Germany with important airports such as Düsseldorf, Cologne and Frankfurt. According to a spokeswoman for air traffic control, “the possible volume of traffic” had to be reduced by half in the morning hours before operations returned to normal from 9 a.m.

Additional delays threaten in Hamburg on Friday. The Ver.di trade union has called on the employees of Real Estate Maintenance GmbH to go on a 24-hour warning strike. The employees are responsible for maintaining the technology in baggage handling, the runways and other infrastructure. At the beginning of their morning shift, the employees are supposed to stop working.