SWISS is offering financial incentives for voluntary departures, as it did for cabin crew.
Keystone-SDA
The airline SWISS has extended its cost-saving measures to ground staff. “The aim is to reduce our administrative staff by around 10%,” said Jens Fehlinger, CEO of SWISS, in an interview with the newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.
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The airline does not want to resort to redundancies, Fehlinger said in an interview published on Sunday. The reduction will be achieved only through voluntary departures, he added.
To achieve savings at the administrative level, SWISS is offering financial incentives, as it did for cabin crew. For example, personnel can receive 20% of the base salary saved if they take unpaid leave.
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The CEO justified this measure by pointing to the pressure on costs that involved not just an increase in kerosene prices. “We have structurally higher costs,” Fehlinger said, citing aircraft maintenance, environmental taxes, and rising personnel costs as examples. In total, the Lufthansa subsidiary wants to reduce its costs by 10%. This is necessary if only to maintain the cost structure, he explained.
‘A reasonable measure’
The Lufthansa Group, which includes SWISS and Edelweiss, announced new cost-saving measures in mid-April. As a result, no new employees will be hired.
According to Fehlinger, the parent company is saving 20% on administration, while SWISS is cutting by “only 10% for now”. He considers this to be “a reasonable measure.” The airline is certainly profitable, but some competitors have surpassed it in terms of profitability, he added. SWISS must continue to develop and grow, and the demand for flights is there, Fehlinger said, adding: “If we don’t take advantage of this, others will.”
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At the end of last year, SWISS ground staff, including administrative personnel, totalled 3,432 people, according to the company’s website.
Around 140 employees have resigned
According to the SWISS CEO, the goals have been achieved as far as cabin crew are concerned. Here too, SWISS relied on an offer of voluntary departures, the company had announced in March. This offer was aimed at the approximately 4,000 cabin crew members at the Zurich base. According to the NZZ am Sonntag, they were promised a bonus of CHF15,000 ($19,300) if they resigned before the end of April.
There will be no layoffs among cabin crew. “Thanks to these purely voluntary measures, we have been able to reduce the excess workforce,” Fehlinger told the newspaper. In all, around 140 cabin crew members will leave SWISS.
Translated from French with AI/gw
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