The first morning of the Swissport workers' strike at the Guacimeta airport has ended "without incidents". This is what Aena has indicated, since this airport control entity was aware this Monday at noon of a single delay at the Lanzarote airport, among the 16 flights operated by this company scheduled throughout the day. That delay, according to what they have explained to La Voz from Aena, "has not reached 20 minutes" and has occurred on a Thompson tour operator flight from Dublin.
The strike by the workers of this handling was announced by the CCOO and USO unions last Thursday and, according to them, will be "indefinite". The union representatives warned that, considering that Swissport operates 180 flights every week in Lanzarote, the strike "threatens to paralyze tourist activity on the island". Despite this, they also pointed out that the minimum services that have been imposed on them are "almost 100%", something they consider "abusive". Finally, at least in those first hours, the airport activity has not been altered.
In case an agreement is not reached and the strike continues, the day in which more problems could be registered in Guacimeta would be this Thursday, when a total of 42 flights operated by Swissport on land are scheduled. For this Monday there were 16 scheduled, while this Tuesday 30 are expected, 9 on Wednesday, the 42 on Thursday, 17 on Friday, 30 on Saturday and 35 on Sunday.
When announcing their strike, these unions denounced the company's "closure" when it comes to negotiating, both in the case of Lanzarote and in previous protests in airports such as Barcelona and Valencia.
Among the reasons given for going on strike, CCOO and USO alluded to the "repeated breaches of the regulations on prevention and occupational hazards, by not protecting the health of all the workers who make up the base" and to the "overexertion of the staff", whose "shortcomings" of personnel, they assure, are such that the company has "difficulties to guarantee the operation" even in "normal conditions". Likewise, they demand the "consolidations of average working days, increases in working days and transformations of temporary contracts to permanent ones" and the "repeated breach" to create the job bank contemplated in the collective agreement. "The objective of the strike is to promote negotiation and seek a definitive solution to this unsustainable situation from a personal and labor point of view for the affected workers", the unions said then.
