Aer Lingus announces further 122 flight cancellations next week

By Gráinne Ní Aodha and Cate McCurry (PA)

Aer Lingus has announced a further 122 flight cancellations next week amid ongoing industrial action in a bitter dispute with its pilots.

The airline said it understood customers’ anxiety and would give them alternative options.

The announcement came as representatives of the pilots’ union meet on Friday to decide whether to escalate its industrial action.

So far, an indefinite work-to-rule action and an eight-hour strike on Saturday has seen more than 270 flights cancelled, affecting thousands of passengers.

The Irish Air Line Pilots’ Association (Ialpa) said that chances of an additional strike are high after talks in the long-running dispute over pay broke down on Thursday.

Representatives from Aer Lingus and Ialpa met for negotiations aimed at resolving the bitter dispute, however after five hours of intensive talks both sides emerged saying they had not reached an agreement.

The work-to-rule began on Wednesday, with pilots refusing to work overtime, accept changes to set rosters or take on out-of-hours management requests.

In a statement on Friday, Aer Lingus said a further 122 flights would be cancelled between Wednesday July 3 and Sunday July 7 to “protect as many services as possible”.

“These cancellations will be implemented today, and details will be communicated to impacted customers. Details of the services impacted are set out on the Travel Advisory page of aerlingus.com,” it said.

“These customers will be given the option to change their flights for free, to claim a refund or voucher.

“Aer Lingus fully understands the anxiety being experienced by customers given the uncertainty caused by Ialpa’s industrial action and is giving impacted customers as many options as possible.”

Aer Lingus has urged Ialpa to consider a joint referral back to the Labour Court in a bid to end the dispute.

Ialpa president Mark Tighe said he doesn’t believe the Labour Court can resolve their issues.

“In terms of Labour Court, they can certainly invite us back in but because we have gone through all these processes, we feel this should be resolved face-to-face with the airline. We won’t be looking for a joint referral,” Mr Tighe said.

“What we have is a clear and obvious example of corporate greed from executives, who got a 66% increase in their payments, while we sit it in a very profitable company who are refusing to even offer a cumulative inflationary increase.

“We’re not looking for an increase in pay, which we did at the beginning of this process. But through negotiations, we reasonably moved and we’ve come to inflation.

“Yesterday, we signalled clearly to the company representatives that we would actually consider below inflation.

“We don’t believe anybody should be getting less than inflation. But yesterday, in an effort to resolve this, we said we would accept less than inflation.”

Mr Tighe said that he could not discuss what was said during Thursday’s talks, but accused the company of escalating the issue through their attacks on pilots and the removal of company privileges.

“We are in a process within our executive and our union where we are considering an escalation in industrial action because the company have informed us that if we don’t agree to work practice changes, they’re simply going to do away with our work practices,” Mr Tighe told BBC Good Morning Ulster show.

They will confirm their plans later on Friday.

“The company have escalated, so I would expect there would be some sort of escalation in response,” he added.

Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said: “I would appeal, in the most strongest terms, to both sides of this dispute to get around the table, work out their differences because every single industrial relations dispute is resolved.

“And it is resolved through compromise.”

Aer Lingus has said it is willing to offer pay increases of 12.25% or above if “improvements in productivity and flexibility” are discussed.

Aer Lingus chief corporate affairs officer Donal Moriarty said on Thursday that the airline “engaged constructively” in discussions with Ialpa and Forsa.