Scandinavian airline SAS says it will cull as many as 5,000 full-time employees because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The carrier announced on Tuesday that it does not expect demand to “significantly recover” for the rest of this year and anticipates a slow recovery that could take “some years” for passenger numbers to reach pre-Corona levels.
Nearly 90 per cent of SAS’ 11,000 strong workforce have already been temporarily laid-off because of the crisis but talks are now taking place with unions to make nearly half of the airline’s workforce permanently redundant. The airline said the workforce has a notice period of around six months.
Up to 1,900 full-time positions will be lost in Sweden, while 1,300 jobs are to be axed in Norway and 1,700 in Denmark. In a statement, SAS said that it must act proactively because of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic. SAS maintained that it would still have the flexibility to quickly ramp up operations if demand recovered faster than currently anticipated.
“COVID-19 has forced SAS to face a new and unprecedented reality that will reverberate not only in the coming months, but also during the coming years,” commented the airline’s chief executive Rickard Gustafson.
“Regretfully, we are forced to adapt our workforce to lower passenger demand… We will now work intensively together with trade union representatives and others to identify solutions so that as few people as possible are affected,” he continued.
SAS has suspended nearly all of its operations apart from a limited number of domestic flights in Norway and Sweden. The airline has been offered a range of financial support packages from governments in Denmark, Norway and Sweden to stave off a potential collapse.
Yesterday, low-cost carrier Norwegian revealed that it does not currently forecast restarting short-haul European flights and long-haul operations until April 2021. It may take until 2022 until normal operations are fully restored. The same sentiment has been shared by several other European airlines including Lufthansa.
