The meeting is awaited with apprehension by its some 2,400 employees. This Wednesday, August 12, a new economic and social committee (CSE) of the regional subsidiary of Air France-KLM will be held in Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), headquarters of Hop! In front of employee representatives, management should confirm the severe restructuring plan to which the airline will be subjected.
Air France-KLM's strategy, already presented at a previous meeting on July 31, is to reduce its national flights by 40%, whose accounts weigh on the company's financial results: the domestic network accused in 2019 a loss of 200 million euros, including 80 million attributed to Hop! A situation further aggravated by the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 epidemic.
A refocus around Roissy and Lyon
In order to bring domestic activity back to equilibrium as quickly as possible, Hop !, which has brought together the regional subsidiaries Brit Air, Regional and Airlinair since 2013, will reduce its traffic by 40% by 2023. To do this, the lines regions with the greatest deficit will be eliminated. Only the connections which supply the two “hubs” of Roissy and Lyon will be maintained.
For the rest, flights from Orly will be abandoned (especially those to Mulhouse, Clermont-Ferrand and Nantes), or transferred to Transavia, the group's medium-haul subsidiary (for those to Biarritz, Pau or Montpellier) . In the name of the ecological transition, the government demanded in return for its aid of seven billion euros to Air France the abandonment of the links served in less than 2 hours 30 by the TGV.
As a consequence of these clear cuts in the activity of Hop !, the number of its planes will drop from 71 to 32 by 2023. And, to rationalize costs, the company should, in the long term, keep only a single model. aircraft, Embraer, and concentrate maintenance in Clermont-Ferrand. The maintenance site for the Bombardier regional jets in Morlaix (Finistère) and its 276 employees would therefore be condemned. The workshops in Lille (North) are also threatened with closure.
Two years to "avoid forced departures"
In total, the voluntary departure plan provides for the elimination of 1,007 jobs, or nearly half of the workforce of Hop !, which employs 2,420 full-time equivalents. Management announced the first departures in 2021 and the end of the plan in 2023. Air France-KLM promises that at least one reclassification proposal in a group company will be made to each employee affected by the departure plan.
“We are skeptical. There is no written commitment on the part of Air France and the group is doing very badly ”, worries Pauline Polonceau, elected to the CSE and member of the UNAC union (Union of Civil Aviation Navigants). Especially since Pierre-Olivier Bandet, CEO of Hop! said not to rule out layoffs by 2023.
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"We will do the maximum, we have two years to avoid forced departures," tried to reassure the boss of the company on July 31 at the Nantes headquarters of the company where he was greeted by a demonstration of angry employees. The latter indeed fear the same fate as Joon, the low-cost subsidiary launched by Air France in 2017 before disappearing a year and a half later.