Frankfurt Thomas Steckenborn wanted to fly from Frankfurt to Tivat in Montenegro at the beginning of June. But the plane had to be evacuated again because the pilot’s headset was defective. To this day, the luggage of the former IT entrepreneur has been lost. The case has since been handed over to Lufthansa’s reimbursement department. Steckenborn can probably copy his things.
What happened to him will likely be experienced by many travelers in the coming weeks. The long-awaited vacation could begin without your own luggage. Baggage handlers – in industry jargon, ground handling service providers – at airports are constantly overwhelmed. There is a lack of staff, also because the corona virus is raging across the board.
“The current problems with the suitcases are just the beginning,” warns Michael C. Wisser, CEO of the Wisag group of companies, in an interview with the Handelsblatt. Wisag provides various services for real estate and is also active as a service provider at airports.
Because of the lack of staff, it will take a while for the mountain of suitcases to be sorted, said Wisser: “Many owners will have traveled back by then. So it’s no use forwarding a suitcase to Mallorca, for example, you have to laboriously find out the home address of the passenger.”
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In Frankfurt, the largest German hub, a four-digit number of suitcases are currently stacked up. In Munich, number two in Germany, there are also several thousand. Around 300 pieces of luggage get stranded at Berlin Airport BER every day. It is not a purely German problem. Images from London’s Heathrow Airport are being shared on social media, showing a terminal hall full of suitcases.
Luggage is also piling up in Amsterdam Schiphol. The Icelandic airline Iceland Air now sends its own baggage handlers on its flights to the Dutch metropolis in order to get the chaos under control.
Entrepreneur Wisser makes no secret of what is still to come for travelers: “It will get even worse in the coming weeks. The corona wave in autumn is not needed for this, the incidences are already high again.”
High risk of infection in the full terminals
In view of the current situation at the airports, the risk of employees there being infected with Covid is very high, says Wisser with a view to the urgent narrowness in the terminals.
“In the coming weeks, I expect a significantly increasing number of sick leave notifications at companies,” said Wisser. Like so many other managers in aviation, the Wisag board and owner see no quick remedy. “Bashing employers won’t help with the solution,” he said, defending the sometimes radical austerity measures in the pandemic.
>>Read about this: 6000 flights canceled – why one Lufthansa board sees no quick end to flight chaos
For temporary workers there is no short-time work allowance for the period after the original time limit. At the same time, however, there was a lack of income, “so the reduction of these jobs was unavoidable”. There was another problem where short-time work benefits could be used. Salaries in ground handling services are generally low. Many employees could not live with the money paid by the state alone.
Stefan Schulte, CEO of the airport operator Fraport, recently described the situation even if the employer increased the short-time work allowance. The employees would still have looked for other jobs. Since many ground handling service providers also work with very tight margins, they could not afford to increase in many cases.
“The fact that we can fly again today is based on the fact that the companies acted as they did. Otherwise many would have gone bankrupt and there would be no more air traffic,” said Wisser. There would be a shortage of employees everywhere, not just at the airports. “Politicians have not yet realized that we not only have a shortage of skilled workers, we also have a labor shortage. We need a new migration policy.”
The board of directors of the family company Wisag predicts even more chaos at German airports.
(Photo: Jörg Baumann)
In order to get the chaos under control in the short term, Wisser has several ideas. “In Ukraine there are many people who were trained for jobs at airports and worked there until the war.” Women in general and men over 60 years of age do not have to go to war. “Why can’t we invite these people over and ask if they will help us?”
In addition, politicians could consider whether it is not enough for these people to bring confirmation from their airport that they have passed a security check there. They would get a special permit for this, would be allowed to work here for three months and could present all the documents for the security check during that time.
“Why should the security requirements in Kyiv be worse than ours?” asks Wisser. Aircraft from Lufthansa, for example, which had been handled in Kyiv before the start of the war, could have flown to Germany without any particular safety concerns.
Does bureaucracy exacerbate the problem?
Wisser also sees a need for optimization in the security check of employees. Like everyone in the industry, he does not question the so-called ZÜP, the background check, that it is important. Employees at airports have access to aircraft, they could deposit explosives there.
However, the question is why one has to state the place of residence in Germany for the security check in the last ten years: “According to the relevant European regulations, five years is enough. This additional period is almost impossible to manage, especially for migrants from crisis countries.”
In Wisser’s eyes, some of the specifications for working at the airport are out of date anyway. “The government should consider whether it is really necessary for employees to speak appropriate German on the apron.
“The aviation industry has suffered a permanent loss of reputation since the 1980s.” Michael C. Wisser, CEO of the Wisag Group
The vast majority of things are done in English at the airport.” With the requirement of adequate knowledge of German or English, one can address a much larger potential of people who might be interested in airport jobs – for example in the countries of the former Yugoslavia or from the Baltic States .
“The aviation industry has suffered a permanent loss of reputation since the 1980s, with the result that there is a lack of appreciation today. The employees feel that,” says Wisser. He understands that the unions, who haven’t been able to negotiate for two and a half years, now want a big piece of the pie. Something has to be done about that too.
But the attractiveness of a job, for example on the apron, does not only depend on money, there are also factors such as working hours and the working environment. “In the end, the passengers will and have to pay for it.”
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