Air Littoral: a new start

Planes of the company of southern people should fly again this morning. The agreement makes the reorganization plan clear and allows the company and trade unions to withdraw judicial processes under way.

Air Littoral’s planes, pinned down during four striking days (85% of flights cancelled on the departure from the regional hub in Nice) will be allowed to fly again this Tuesday morning. After two days of negotiations, an agreement about modalities of the reorganisation plan of the company has been set on Monday night between trade unions and the direction.Modalities of the agreementAs far as trade unions are concerned, they have set “a commitment in social peace for three years” and they have withdrawn judicial processes under way. And managers have withdrawn processes they had initiated against trade unions and they have granted supplementary financial efforts. And they have increase the amount of compensations to laid off employees (1.5 month per seniority year for the land staff and the business flying staff and 1.75 for the technique flying staff).Another point of the agreement concerns 160 employees who are going to be transferred because of a grouping of fleets (the ATR 40 in Montpellier and the jets, the CRJ, in Nice). Compensations for base transfer of these employees will be multiplied fourfold. The global cost of the reorganization, after the withdraw of Swissair and the takeover by Marc Dufour, should be up to 160 million francs. An amount which corresponds what Swissair released last July.Conditions for a new startThe agreement, which puts an end to the strike which cost the company 6 million francs a day, allows Air Littoral to reorganize a social climate which had become very armful. With this new deal, it creates, according to Marc Rochet, the president of the board of directors, “the necessary conditions for a new start of Air Littoral”. A good news for employees of the company.But a good news for the airport of Nice as well. For the first time in many years, the airport experiences in 2001 a stagnation of the traffic (a global increase by 0.4% but a decrease by 10% of the national traffic) particularly because of the crash of Swissair and its dream of a second French air pole. The new start of Air Littoral (1.2 million passengers in 2000) is one of the conditions for the recovering of the development of the platform from Nice…