Government says strike on TAP has cost tens of millions of euros – publico

                 

                         
                     

                         

                 

 
                         

The first three-day strike by pilots of TAP cost the airline 10 million company. The estimate was made by the Secretary of State for Transport, Sérgio Monteiro, during a press conference to take stock of the strike.

                     

                         This number, he said, includes the reduction of gate receipts, the cost of accommodation and meals for passengers affected by cancellation of flights and also the positive impact on the company of non-payment of salaries of the pilots who joined the strike.

Sergio Monteiro warned that if the strike remains until May 10, the impact will reach 30 million euros. The minister appealed, however, the direction of the Union of Civil Aviation Pilots (SPAC) to avoid these losses and desconvoque the strike that began May 1.

“Better late than never. Yet we are in time to prevent more than 20 million euros of losses and the indirect impact on the economy, “and insisitu,” pilots, mostly already gave the answer that the country expected, lacking the union leadership to desconvoque strike as soon as possible. “

The Transport Secretary of State also warned that customer confidence in TAP” is to suffer “and that the last two weeks of April, when the strike was announced , the market share of TAP at Lisbon airport “fell to the lowest level ever.”

Asked to achieve this drop in market share, Sérgio Monteiro only said that “the strike is much more onerous for TAP than operational problem occurred in the summer of last year. ” At the time, exemplified, the market share fell 1.2 percentage points, and now the loss reaches 10 percentage points.

“The day TAP May 11 will not equal the TAP May 1, “he said, warning that many customers may have lost confidence in the company.

In relation to the company’s privatization process, the secretary of State assured that keeps the date of 15 May for the submission of proposals and only then you can understand the impact of the strike in the interest of potential investors.

The pilots of TAP meet on Monday the ten-day strike bedroom, on the grounds that the Government is not meeting two agreements signed in 1999 and in December 2014.

The first gave the pilots a stake of up to 20% of TAP in the event of privatization in exchange for salaries update, but the Government now says that the claim has no validity, referring to an opinion of the Advisory Board of the Attorney General’s Office, which gives that claim as prescribed.

The second agreement joined nine unions last December, but the SPAC says the Government does not intend to stick to it, which is manifested by failure to breach the sanctions included in the privatization tender documents. At this point, the most controversial is the replacement of seniority (seniority allowance), frozen successively from the state budget for 2011.