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LAST UPDATE | 18 Jun 2024
AER LINGUS PILOTS have announced that they will begin an indefinite work-to-rule against their employer from 26 June amid an ongoing row over pay.
Members of the Irish Airline Pilots’ Association (IALPA) confirmed this evening that the industrial action will include a refusal to work overtime or any out of hours duties requested by management.
Yesterday, the union voted 98.82% in favour of taking industrial action, up to and including full withdrawal of labour. Turnout for the ballot was 89%.
It was the second time that IALPA members had voted in favour of strike action, with a ballot last week securing 98% support.
Aer Lingus has said that the decision taken by the union was “entirely unnecessary” and will “inevitably result in significant disruption to our customers and to other employees”.
Let’s take a look at how people planning to travel might be affected.
Aer Lingus pilots who are members of the union are seeking a pay rise of 23.8% over three years, which would be similar to what British Airlines – a sister airline of Aer Lingus – awarded pilots in 2019.
Members have already rejected a Labour Court recommendation that they should receive a pay increase agreement of 9.25% in the near term.
The IALPA said the 23.8% increase it is seeking is “clearly reasonable and affordable for a profitable company such as Aer Lingus.”
It noted that in 2023, Aer Lingus had a full year operating profit of €225 million. This was a 400% increase on 2022, when a full year operating profit of €45 million was recorded.
A spokesperson for Aer Lingus has said that IALPA has “rejected the outcomes of two independent processes which have sought to resolve the issue”.
They said that Aer Lingus pilots are “rightfully well paid for the work that they do” and “more than fairly compensated compared to the market”.
Speaking to The Journal after pilots voted in favour of strike action yesterday, travel commentator Eoghan Corry said that people should not panic.
“The airline is under contract to get you to where you’re supposed to go. There’s not much point fretting about it,” he said.
“It’s between the airline and the union, and if the strike does go ahead, you won’t be out of pocket. They will use Iberia, British Airways, whatever means they can, to get you to where you’re supposed to go.”
Under EU regulations, consumers have certain rights when flights are delayed or cancelled. That could include when there is a strike at the airline involved.
These rights may include compensation for delayed or cancelled flights, as well as care and assistance while passengers wait.
These rights apply when travelling through airports in any EU country or Norway, on board flights departing from these countries, and on flights arriving into any of these countries if you are travelling with an EU airline.
A spokesperson for the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) told The Journal: “Strikes by baggage handlers or other groups external to the airline may be considered extraordinary circumstances, but strikes by airline staff – referred to as internal strikes – are not considered extraordinary circumstances and so any compensation due under EU regulations must be paid.”
Where a passenger’s flight is cancelled, they are entitled to either:
They may also be entitled to compensation.
The CCPC spokesperson added that consumers who have trouble accessing compensation can lodge a complaint through the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA), which is responsible for enforcing these rights in Ireland.
In this case, Aer Lingus had requested that a minimum of 15 days notice be given by IALPA if they intended to strike in order to minimise disruption for passengers.
A passenger is not entitled to compensation if they have received at least two weeks notice that their flight has been cancelled.
A spokesperson for IALPA told The Journal yesterday that it was considering the airline’s request. However, the union has now decided to give Aer Lingus the legally required notice period of seven days.
Any passengers who have their flights significantly delayed or cancelled will be entitled to compensation once they are given less than 14 days notice.
The level of compensation will depend on the distance of the flight in question:
Passengers may also be entitled to compensation if they arrive at their destination 3 hours or more after the scheduled arrival time. Again, the level of compensation will depend on the distance of the flight.
If the airline can prove that the delay was caused by an extraordinary circumstance which could not have been avoided, no compensation is payable. But as stated above, the CCPC has said that strikes by airline staff are not considered extraordinary circumstances.
Some travel insurance policies will cover travel disruption in the event of a strike, according to Irish Travel Agents Association (ITAA) CEO Clare Dunne.
“If they have travel disruption cover or industrial action cover in place, then they may be able to claim something back,” Dunne told The Journal yesterday.
However, if passengers attempt to take out the travel insurance now, it’s unlikely to cover them at this point.
“What we’re hearing from some of the insurance companies is that now that the event has been declared, even though it hasn’t been quantified, the underwriters are still saying that they’re not prepared to cover it because it’s been announced.”
Dunne advised anyone who has booked with a travel agent to speak to them about their options.
“The travel agents will assist them to get the best alternatives, whether they want to go on a later or earlier flight or whatever it is, to get them where they need to be.”
The planned work-to-rule will take effect from one minute past midnight on 26 June and will last indefinitely. A potential strike also remains an option.
However, speaking to The Journal yesterday, Eoghan Corry said that he believes an all-out strike won’t happen.
“My strong instinct is there will not be a strike. They will go back into negotiations and there will be a deal, but it will be later rather than sooner,” he said.
“The reason is that the airline is now hemmed in a corner. The union have them where they want,” he said.
“They’re already hitting the forward bookings for Aer Lingus, because people who were thinking of booking Aer Lingus are going elsewhere for summer bookings.”
If a full strike does go ahead, it will mean Aer Lingus will have to reschedule flights and bring passengers where they’re supposed to go, and if IALPA give less than two weeks’ notice, Aer Lingus will have to pay compensation.
“There’s probably a lot of talking to be done before there’s a deal. The reason is that the union are moving from a position of strength,” Corry said.
“They could wait until the day of the strike and then strike the deal at four o’clock in the morning. We’ve seen that happen in the past.
“There’s nothing to be gained by striking the deal in advance. The more you scare the passengers, the more you damage Aer Lingus and that’s what they’re setting out to do.”
This article was originally published at 7pm on 17 June. It has been updated to reflect the most up-to-date information.
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I am impressed, the journal did not turn it into a climate world is boiling.
@: climate change makes the work of arsonists easier. In Greece’s case, the boundaries of forest areas are marked but aren’t set law, so there’s an inventive to burn dowm and redraw forest boundaries by those that want to build houses, hotels and tourist resorts. About half of fires in Europe have a known cause, and of these just over half are arson.
@David Jordan: why are you trying to link climate change to arsonists?
@Shane Doyle: I think you’ll find the OP brought climate change into the discussion.
@Diarmuid Hunt: op says afp enough said..love their articles describing children killed in Palestine as 15 year old militants.
@David Jordan: next you will be telling me the Nazis had gas chambers. Your very easily led in fairness or your paid. One or the other.
In 2009, the public discovered emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit exposing how scientists who have been enormously influential in promoting the concept of man-made climate change actually attempted to cook the books to obtain results that served their narrative that the planet was heating at a dangerous trend due to higher levels of carbon dioxide. One of these scientists included Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.
Hansen, Philip Jones, Michael Mann, et al. were all involved in trying “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming,” according to the leaked emails. The emails also revealed how this cabal of scientists would discuss various ways to stonewall the public from seeing the “background data on which their findings and temperature records were based,” even going as far as deleting significant amounts of data. They would engage in efforts to smear “any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.”
@: You’re / your. Anyone paying you needs a refund.
@Ken O’Neill: Even ExxonMobil scientists accurately predicted global warming back in 1977. Exxon’s scientists ran about a dozen sophisticated computer models nearly 50 years ago, and given the models are now nearly half a century old, it’s possible to see if their projections came true.
Exxon’s research correctly forecasted the globe would warm by around 0.2°C every decade.
Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S. and Oreskes, N., 2023. Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science, 379(6628), p.eabk0063. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abk0063
Human caused Climate Change is not nonsense, it’s one of the most scientifically validated and important challenges we face. The first predictions of global warming were published in newspapers over 100 years ago, the science is not new, look at the evidence:
This graph shows the rapid rise in Temperature and CO2 for the last 2,000 years (0 – 2000 AD) perfectly overlap, showing that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere is driving global warming:
https://imgur.com/gallery/5ioVzFY
But instead of warning people, ExxonMobil buried the evidence and instead paid conservative think tanks to lobby against the science of human caused climate change.
For example, 40% of the total funds of The Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that rejects of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking, came from from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2007 e.g., ExxonMobil donated $119,000 in 2005 to Heartland, its biggest gift since 1998.
(The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984 and it worked with closely with the tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s in an attempt to discredit the health risks of second-hand smoke. Some of the same lobbyists that worked to defend tobacco company profits also lobbied against climate change related science)
See: Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
Contrary to ExxonMobil’s sponsored disinformation there is an overwhelming 99% consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. It’s something we are responsible for and something we need to remedy.
Lynas, M., Houlton, B.Z. and Perry, S., 2021. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11), p.114005.
@Ken O’Neill: “Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.”
No. The term Climate was first coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker. We see here, two papers dating from 1977, that used the term climate change:
Baes, C.F., Goeller, H.E., Olson, J.S. and Rotty, R.M., 1977. Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Uncontrolled Experiment: Possibly severe consequences of growing CO2 release from fossil fuels require a much better understanding of the carbon cycle, climate change, and the resulting impacts on the atmosphere. American Scientist, 65(3), pp.310-320.
Schneider, S.H., 1977. Climate change and the world predicament: A case study for interdisciplinary research. Climatic Change, 1(1), pp.21-43.
Also, Eunice Newton Foote first demonstrated in 1856 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it traps the Sun’s heat via en experiment with tube filled with CO2.
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature,” wrote Eunice Foote in her paper titled Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.
And one of the first warnings that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming was published in Popular Mechanics in 1912:
“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”
So we understood that CO2 warms the planet over 100 years ago, and scientists made predictions that burning fossil fuels and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would warm the planet, decades before warming was noticed. This successful prediction, proves the theory that humans are causing global warming, is true.
@John Jon: john, will you ever pick a side, no wonder everyone takes the p I s s out of you.
@David Jordan: that was way too long to read tbh. But the narrative is shot in the arse when you look at all the companies involved. All the companies involved on the green and fossil side are shareholder controlled by blackrock , vanguard and state street. All the craziness in the world is being pushed by these lunatics and their investors. The climate communism, the woke rubbish etc… The public are not stupid. Nothing in the world has the right to take peoples freedom or force behavior. Its wrong and totalitarian. I will not comply and neither will most people.
@Shane Doyle: In utter desperation I assume?
@David Jordan: Long story short – Arson is not Global Boiling.
@Ken O’Neill:
.
The Climategate scandal was given new life in 2011, with the release of new emails. The new round of leaked emails at the time provided more teeth to the revelations of 2009. Here are a couple of egregious emails from Jones found, via Forbes:“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,” writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email.
To all those Journal contributors relentlessly attacking those of us who highlighted the fact that these fires were in all probability started maliciously and not the result of “Global Warming” I want to say Thank You.
Thank You for offering us such a humble and contrite public apology.
For future reference:
Don’t believe everything the MSM tell you.
Use your CRITICAL FACULTIES and investigate properly before speaking.
Once again Thank You.
(Can’t be easy admitting you were duped so easily)
@Tommy Haze: David Jordan will be along with a 10 meter comment on how wrong you are.
@Eric Gaffney:
Haha!
Actually, I like Mr Jordan, he’s civilised and polite, not easily ruffled, reminds of those French civil servants who upon receipt of a towering stack of foldered paperwork, smile and rub their hands with glee.
@Tommy Haze: sorry to rain on your parade but only a minority of these fires were started maliciously. If you had bothered reading the article, you would have noticed this section: ‘Fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios said 140 people had been arrested on suspicion of arson, most of it accidental. Most cases were related to welding and agricultural work that ignored high-risk weather warnings.’
Critical faculties… hahahahaha!. Very good.
@Tommy Haze: I like the comparison.
@ForrestG45:
.
Prove it or stfu.
Last week’s cOnSpiRaCy ThEoRy is this week’s news.
Again.
@Alan B: Not helping but not a deciding factor either. It should have been reported on. It was known weeks ago that arson will involved.
@Alan B: Those who mocked people for pointing that out on previous wildfire articles didn’t know that, clearly. The usual “come off facebook and youtube, climate denying tin foil hat wearing blah blah blah” crowd.
By everyone do you mean them too?
@Alan B: how dare you use plain logic in the journal comments! They won’t like that around here
Well thanks for finally reporting on this.
The big problem across Europe is forest management and leaving land in overgrown states
@john mac: (plus global warming, and lack of rain).
@john mac: Ahh that comment reminded me of the brilliant mind who suggested that the problem was that the forest floor should have been raked… Ahh pure gold…
It stands to reason that if you have an itinerant population lighting fires for cooking/heating water etc, out in the open then a fire can start extremely easily. This would explain the high migrant death count .
Arsonists should always get charged for attempted murder with long mandatory jail time…
I love increasing my carbon footprint every year :)
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