Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The pandemic has hit the aviation industry hard. How can European governments respond to this crisis in aviation? In Germany, Lufthansa received a state bailout of €9 billion and in return the state took a 20% stake, making it the largest shareholder. Presumably this gives the German state significant leverage now in determining airline policy. The option that I would favour is the nationalisation or renationalisation of airlines. This would allow the State to act directly to defend jobs, wages, conditions and services. The next crisis, the climate crisis, could then be met on the basis of a just transition policy free from the agendas of profiteers. However, the caretaker Government seems to be operating on the basis of a third option. This involves the State providing subsidies while allowing the owners of the airline a free hand in driving down the wages and conditions of their workforce. CityJet has sought the protection of the Irish courts and this has been granted by way of examinership. Examinership is meant to protect a company from its creditors while jobs are being protected, possibly through restructuring. That is not what is happening here. The airline's Cayman Island shareholders are being protected from the creditors while the airline shuts down its Dublin base, cuts its workforce in half and offshores Irish jobs by way of hiring new staff through Copenhagen on contracts that offer lesser wages and conditions. The CityJet situation highlights the particularly vulnerable position of precarious workers in an industry where a majority of people who work on Irish-registered aircraft for Irish-registered airlines are no longer directly employed. This vulnerability has been facilitated by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments in recent times.

I do not have time to deal with the Ryanair situation so I will deal instead with the question of Aer Lingus. Aer Lingus workers were hailed as national heroes when they loaded, crewed and flew planes to China and back to bring us the personal protective equipment, PPE, that our health service so desperately needed. However, the heroes are now being treated as zeros by the ruthless vulture capitalists who run Aer Lingus and are now exploiting this Covid crisis to drive through measures they have wanted to introduce for years.

Instead of sitting down with the unions to discuss options which the workers themselves put forward such as career breaks, part-time work and other rescue measures, the company is trying to take unilateral action by imposing the following shock-doctrine, race-to-the-bottom terms on its workforce. It proposes 500 redundancies, reduction of pay to 30% of pre-Covid levels, hiring of casual, so-called contingency labour, banning strikes or any form of industrial action until February 2022 and telling pilots that they have a certain number of weeks to consider their options but that all the other staff members must make decisions now.

Let us break down some of those figures. When one takes the temporary wage subsidy into account, 30% of pre-Covid levels means Aer Lingus can employ a considerable number of low-wage workers and pay them nothing or, in some cases, marginally above that. The company's original proposal of 50% of pre-Covid wages means that a worker who was previously on €800 a week will take home €400 with €350 paid by taxpayers and a mere €50 by Aer Lingus, with the company paying a pension contribution of zero. Aer Lingus workers tell me that a continuation of that policy into next year, combined with the ending of the mortgage payment freeze, would result in families being unable to make mortgage payments and in the spectre of airline workers losing their homes. Meanwhile this caretaker Government, which has subsidised 4,300 Aer Lingus pay packets to the tune of €18 million to date, stands idly by and takes no action to make its subsidy in any way conditional on an end to management by diktat and the opening of something that would resemble genuine negotiations. Members should recall this is a company, privatised between 2006 and 2015, that has recorded profits for the best part of a decade including €276 million last year, €305 million the previous year and which has cash reserves of €900 million. Moreover, it has a parent company, IAG, which made profits of more than €3 billion in 2018, yet it says it cannot afford to have genuine negotiations with its workforce.

I congratulate the Aer Lingus cabin crew, members of Fórsa, who voted by a three to one majority - even with a gun to their heads - to reject the company's terms. The workers represented by SIPTU must now have their say. I stand for the renationalisation of Aer Lingus, with compensation only to be paid based on human need, not giving vast payouts to vulture capitalists who pursue policies such as this. I put Members of this House on notice that in Cork, on Shannonside and in the north County Dublin constituencies, there will be a surge of workers anger in the weeks ahead if a new Government does not at the very least intervene to stop the Aer Lingus vulture capitalists from exploiting State subsidies while the company tries to walk all over the rights of its workforce. That will not be tolerated.

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