Editor’s note: This article was first published in December 2010, days after the walkout by Spanish air traffic controllers over the early-December long weekend. The whole piece is a reaction to that news.
As we all know, Spain’s air traffic controllers have “boycotted” the long holiday weekend for Spaniards and for tourists travelling to Spain, causing chaos at the airports and incalculable losses for hotels, businesses and, above all, for the airport operator AENA.
In my view, they made the mistake of turning the public against them, and people won’t hesitate to call for the controllers to be sacked and even jailed. That said, is the strike justified? What do we know about these controllers? What do we know about their working conditions? The answer is simple: we only know what we’ve been allowed to hear.
Once again, we may be looking at a case of television deception, where we’ve been led to believe that an air traffic controller earned €300,000 a year and worked four hours a day. In an interview with Gizmodo, a controller explained that only four or five people actually earned €300,000, and they weren’t even controllers.
The same controller says they tried to negotiate with the government every way they could, but it refused to budge and effectively “banned” them from exercising the right to strike that every worker has.
The controllers say the government’s measures were based on a wrong or false figure: the €12 billion deficit that AENA has been carrying since 2009, which the government wants to blame on controllers’ high salaries. The controllers, on the other hand, maintain that the deficit comes from the company’s own mismanagement at other terminals, which lose more than they earn.
They also say they reached an agreement with the government on their rights, and that to this day the government has broken every one of the points that were supposedly settled. That is what has made many controllers “snap” and say they can’t take any more.
You can read the full interview with this controller here: The air traffic controllers’ conflict (in Spanish). It may change your view of how the controllers have behaved. Although, honestly, if they had ruined my holiday like that… I’m not so sure 🙂
And today I find myself asking: how far does the media manipulate the information we get? Sometimes the mere fact that a news presenter tells us something is enough for us to assume it happened exactly as they said.
What I can say personally, from some controllers I know at smaller airports, is that they live with a level of stress few people could bear, and it’s true that, in a way, their job has lives at stake.
Here is the blog of an air traffic controller from Palma, where she also sets out the situation: Controladores aéreos y otras hierbas (in Spanish).
Featured image: Slashme, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
