Strike sparks delays at Geneva’s airport

Snow added an extra challenge for the Geneva International Airport on Monday after a strike of baggage handlers led to a chaotic scene on the weekend when a record number of passengers clogged the main terminal.

Many flights were delayed and some were cancelled as an early morning snowfall snarled traffic and delayed transit service throughout the canton.

Around 113,000 travellers passed through Cointrin on Sunday and Saturday during what is traditionally the busiest period for the airport as a group of employees of Swissport, a servicing company, walked out in a dispute over a new contract.

Company workers represented by the SSP public services union voted on Sunday to continue the work stoppage.

A union spokesman said the decision was made after the company refused to make a new offer to the workers it represents.

The striking Swissport workers – about 50 of them at the Geneva airport – move baggage to and from planes.

A similar number of workers from another company engaged in similar ground support services, Dnata, ended a work stoppage on the weekend after reaching an agreement that included higher base wages and extra pay for night work.

The SSP is calling for all service companies at the Geneva airport to be subject to the same collective agreement, something that airport management has declared is not possible.

Bertrand Stämpfli, airport spokesman, told Swisster that just a small number of Swissport employees “perhaps, seven” remained off the job on Monday.

“We have more of a problem with the snow than the strike at the moment,” Stämpfli said.

While only a “handful” were striking on the weekend they succeeded in slowing down the normal baggage handling operations, he acknowledged.

Passengers experienced long queues at checkout areas, in addition to delays in baggage collection and flight departures.

Swissport attempted to alleviate the problems by dispatching non-union workers from Zurich. As well, airport fire fighters were pressed into service to move baggage between the planes and the terminal.

On Saturday, Stämpfli said 3,500 items of luggage were undelivered to carousels. They were subsequently forwarded to their owners the following day.

Stämpfli said it was a “miracle” that there weren’t more problems.

Swissport employs around 1,300 workers at the Geneva airport and most of them have accepted a new collective agreement, he said.

But the SSP, representing a small minority of the employees, chose to strike on a weekend when hordes of travellers - including extra planeloads from the UK and Russia - were departing after ski holidays.

An unidentified union employee from Swissport told the Tribune de Genève the delays and holdups at the airport were less a result of the strike action than the volume of flights, boosted by the large number of charter planes.

Cointrin “is accepting too many flights – we are beyond the airport’s limits,” the worker said.

Stämpfli admitted that Cointrin’s designed capacity is for 100,000 passengers on a weekend.

He said the airport exceeds that capacity only on several weekends a year, which is usually manageable. He described last weekend’s situation as an “exceptional” case exacerbated by the strike.

Meanwhile, the five centimetres of snow that fell on Geneva caused chaos on the streets with accidents and bottlenecks delaying commuters for several hours.

Geneva police reported at least 30 accidents, although no injuries resulted. Transit service was held up by the traffic jams, with delays of at least an hour for buses, although trams operated as usual.

Cantonal authorities drew criticism for their poor response to the relatively small amount of snow, following early warnings of the precipitation from Meteosuisse, the national weather office.