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Baggage carts at Frankfurt Airport: hardly any airport experience, high language barrier?
Photo: Fraport / photothek / IMAGO
The service providers at Frankfurt Airport initially do not want to recruit any new temporary workers from Turkey.
This was announced by a spokesman for the airport operator Fraport.
The forces offered through a Turkish staffing agency did not have the expected qualifications, the spokesman said.
Among other things, there is a lack of the announced airport experience and knowledge of German.
The effort involved in appropriate training does not correspond to the benefit that can be achieved if the deployment is limited to three months.
The “Frankfurter Rundschau” reported about it first.
After the airport operators had massively cut jobs in recent years, there were staff shortages in the summer of 2022 - and chaotic weeks at German airports.
Passengers sometimes waited weeks for their luggage, flights were canceled or rebooked at short notice.
Many airlines have reduced their flight operations significantly.
There were also strikes at several airports.
In view of the chaos, the associations of the airports and the ground handlers had pushed to be allowed to hire at least 2,000 temporary workers from Turkey on easier terms, for example for baggage services.
After three federal ministries voted, the recruitment process was finally simplified: the originally prescribed check of whether German employees were available for the jobs was to be dispensed with.
Nevertheless, there was criticism of the allegedly lengthy security checks by the state authorities.
Fraport reports stable operation
At the beginning of August, the chairman of the board of the employers' association of ground handling service providers in air transport (ABL), Thomas Richter, still expected that around 250 foreign helpers would be deployed at German airports by mid-August.
However, Frankfurt Airport has stabilized its operations and is continuing its own recruitment efforts, said the spokesman for Fraport AG.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 1,000 employees have been hired, who are gradually taking on the required functions.
The situation will ease further in the fall.
jlk/dpa