Air France says it will only operate 45% of its scheduled flights on Sunday after talks with pilots failed to produce an agreement to end a 14-day strike.<\/p>\n
More than half of its pilots planned to strike, the airline said.<\/p>\n
Pilots’ union SNPL offered to end the strike late on Friday if an independent mediator between the two parties was appointed.<\/p>\n
The airline said a mediator was not necessary.<\/p>\n
“A mediator should intervene only if talks between the management and its union representatives fall apart,” said an Air France spokeswoman.<\/p>\n
“There are still talks.”<\/p>\n
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also rejected the demand for a mediator.<\/p>\n
Mr Valls has called for an end to the strike, calling it “intolerable for customers, intolerable for the company, and intolerable for the country’s economy”.<\/p>\n
The government owns a 16% stake in the airline, which merged with Dutch carrier KLM in 2004.<\/p>\n
The airline says the strike is costing it about 20m euros ($25.4; \u00a315.6m) a day.<\/p>\n
Budget competition<\/strong><\/p>\n Pilots are angry about Air France’s plans to develop its low-cost operation, Transavia, via regional hubs around Europe.<\/p>\n This is part of wider attempts by the airline to stem losses and compete with budget carriers such as Easyjet and Ryanair that have taken a large chunk of business from more established European carriers.<\/p>\n The company has since agreed to keep Transavia operations within France as a concession to the unions, but insists that it maintains the right to vary employment contracts for those working at the low-cost subsidiary.<\/p>\n It argues this is the only way it can compete with budget airlines.<\/p>\n The pilots are demanding that the same contract be offered to all pilots across all Air France’s operations.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Air France says it will only operate 45% of its scheduled flights on Sunday after talks with pilots failed to produce an agreement to end a 14-day strike. More than half of its pilots planned to strike, the airline said. Pilots’ union SNPL offered to end the strike late on Friday if an independent mediator […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":51744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-51742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/51744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}