After 15 days of strikes and six days of intense negotiations, the pilots and SAS management have agreed. NRK can experience that.
Also Swedish Today’s Industry gets confirmation from the chairman of the board of SAS, Carsten Dilling, that the parties have reached an agreement.
– We have an agreement, now we will only get the last signatures in place, Dilling says to the newspaper at 9 p.m.
Half an hour later, SAS sent out one press release where they write that an agreement has not yet been signed.
NRK has previously been able to report that the dispute has been particularly about term of the collective agreement.
On Monday night, NRK will be informed that the duration of the agreement will be five years.
During this period, the pilots cannot go on strike or renegotiate the agreement. In Norway, it is common for a collective agreement to have a duration of two years.
The strike ends
The agreement means that the pilot strike will now end.
The strike has so far cost SAS 100-130 million Swedish kroner per day.
Around 30,000 passengers have been affected by the strike daily.
The company will get the planes in the air as soon as possible. But it will still take a couple of days to be in full operation again, NRK was informed on Monday.
– Normally, it takes two to five days to get full production again after a strike, says Aleksander Wasland, leader of the Norwegian Aviation Association, to NRK.
Unusual mediation
– It is a completely unusual mediation, I would say, national mediator Mats Ruland told the press during one of the lunch breaks this weekend.
Previously, the national mediator has called it a major labor dispute that has affected several parties.
– There are many who are not allowed to travel, many who are stranded and the company is in a difficult financial situation, he told NRK earlier this week.
Mats Ruland met the press outside Näringslivets Hus in Stockholm, where negotiations between SAS and the Scandinavian pilot associations have taken place in recent days.
Photo: Magnus Andersson / TT / NTB
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Get to the top of an economic crisis
The strike became a fact when the parties broke off negotiations on 4 July and 900 pilots in Norway, Sweden and Denmark went on strike.
The core of the conflict was the creation of two staffing companies.
When the pandemic came, around 560 pilots in Norway lost their jobs. Nevertheless, they were given a five-year right to re-employment.
The subsidiaries SAS Link and SAS Connect were started up after the agreement on the right of re-employment was entered into. These will take over aircraft and be filled with new pilots.
The SAS pilots believe that the company is thereby trying to circumvent its obligations to bring the dismissed pilots back.
SAS, for its part, has rejected this and believes that the company relates to all agreements entered into.
The strike came on top of an economic crisis in SAS where the company has said that they must cut annual costs by 7.5 billion Swedish kroner and at the same time raise 9.5 billion Swedish kroner in new capital.
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