SAS CEO Anko van der Werff believes that the pilots have taken the company hostage and calls the strike “shameful”.
“The decision to go on strike shows careless behavior on the part of the pilot associations and a shockingly low understanding of the critical situation in which SAS finds itself,” he said in a press release.
The union, for its part, emphasizes that SAS, despite promises of wage cuts and abolished holidays, has forced the strike.
“The pilots have been willing to make significant concessions, but it is impossible for us to reach an agreement where we give a lot but SAS almost nothing,” writes the Swedish Pilot Association in a press release.
The union: “Not too much requested”
The union demands guarantees that the pilots’ jobs will not be transferred to staffing companies, and that SAS re-employs the pilots who were laid off during the pandemic.
“It is not too much to ask for guarantees that our workplaces will not be moved to staffing companies with completely new and deteriorating conditions and that SAS keeps the agreement that our colleagues get their jobs back,” says Martin Lindgren, chairman of the Swedish SAS the pilots, in the press release.
According to the union, the strike is about SAS not re-employing the pilots that the company laid off during the pandemic by using pilots from the subsidiaries SAS Link and SAS Connect, which act as staffing companies.
Mediators have been called in to negotiate between the parties.
– We work with available funds to resolve the conflict, every possible moment of the day, says Jan Sjölin, a mediator, to SVT.