Bobigny (AFP)
Hotel, catering, cleaning: with moribund traffic due to the pandemic, the usual swarming of Charles-de-Gaulle airport has slowed down significantly, weakening some 90,000 direct jobs and a pool mainly focused on the activity of the first airport European.
"Today we are not working, it's been nine months, because the airline activity is on + stand by +. From the moment you reduce the activity, this automatically has an impact on the subcontractors", notes Manuel Goncalves, CGT delegate of Servair, the leading French airline catering company, a subsidiary of Air France-KLM and of Gategroup.
A collective performance agreement, which cuts in particular on leave and employee benefits, was signed at the end of November, to ensure the "survival" of the company which has recorded a "sudden drop of more than 80%" in its activity because of the health crisis, according to a document consulted by AFP.
The pandemic has disrupted the previously flourishing activity of the entire airport platform.
The number of passengers has been divided by ten, falling from 200,000 to 20,000 per day on average.
Only freight is doing well, driven by deliveries of all kinds, including masks and now vaccines.
The ADP (Aéroports de Paris) manager is going to cut 11% of its workforce and Air France, another pillar of the platform, announced in July its intention to reduce its workforce and those of its subsidiary Hop!
7,580 jobs by the end of 2022.
In turn, all of the related companies find themselves caught up in this maelstrom.
"All suffer, at different levels", assures Pascal Doll, president (DVD) of the Roissy Pays de France agglomeration community.
"For us, it's a bit of a social disaster. There, it is held by threads because partial unemployment passes the lag effect" between the decline in activity and the consequences on employment, grumbled Mr. Goncalves, who deplores the absence of "counterparts" from Air France to which the State has granted 7 billion euros in aid.
- Two hotels closed -
"Signals tell us that companies are starting to adjust, because even if there is a resumption of traffic, it will take months before returning to the level before the pandemic", underlines Eric Lamy, secretary general of the local union CGT de Roissy, which fears the arrival of social plans at the beginning of the year.
"We are afraid that the impact (of the crisis) will be thousands of jobs cut on the platform, not to mention all the precarious workers who saw their mission come to an end in March," deplores Mr. Lamy.
A job cut at Air France results in "the elimination of three to five jobs in subcontracting," he said.
In the Val-d'Oise, "for the moment there are very few procedures, the commercial court does not note an influx", nuance Xavier Delarue, delegated prefect for equal opportunities.
The future of companies will depend in part on "the vitality of the recovery" and the way in which aid mechanisms will stop, he outlines.
If the dikes are still holding up, some breaches are already appearing.
Two hotels, the Moxy in Charles-de-Gaulle and the Courtyard-Marriott in Mesnil-Amelot (Seine-et-Marne), a neighboring town, have gone out of business, says the Roissy Dev economic development agency in its November economic report.
At Onet, a subcontractor specializing in airport assistance including baggage management, only around 10% of the 400 employees work, when Dutyfly Solutions, which sells tax-free products in flight, launched a social plan for its fifty employees, according to this note.
Straddling the Val-d'Oise and Seine-et-Marne, the airport platform is nevertheless the economic locomotive of this basin.
"We would like to have the development of other activities so as not to put all our eggs in the same basket", slips Mr. Doll, convinced that the recovery will "not necessarily be up to the necessary catching up".
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates the drop in traffic at 66% over the year 2020 and estimates that global air traffic will not return to its 2019 level before 2024.
© 2020 AFP