The UK government has officially warned holiday travelers to be prepared for long delays, disruptions, and ”a remote possibility” of closed airports across the country due to a planned strike of Border Force staff, Home Office said in a press release Wednesday.
Nearly 1,000 Border Force employees from the Public and Commercial Services trade union will protest over low pay every day from Friday to the end of the year, except December 27.
The strike comes after months of disputes over remuneration, pensions, and working conditions. It will affect numerous airports across the country, including Heathrow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Gatwick, Glasgow, and Manchester airports, and the port of Newhaven in East Sussex.
It is the first Christmas in three years without coronavirus restrictions. According to the aviation analytics company Cirium, cited by the BBC, nearly two million passengers are set to arrive in the UK between December 23 and December 31.
BBC previously said that more than 10,000 flights are scheduled to arrive at the affected airports during that period. Earlier this week, BBC reported Virgin Atlantic and British Airways had already stopped selling inbound flights to Heathrow Airport.
In November, nearly 600 civil servants and soldiers have been trained to conduct border checks and will replace the absent guards to minimize the impact, unnamed sources familiar with the matter told The Guardian. Some 200 Home Office employees and another 200 civil servants from HM Revenue & Customs joined the training too.
The training process features special skills to interview and question passengers, spot potential victims of human trafficking and child abuse, and spot forged documents. Border Force guards usually undergo a three-week training before interacting with the passengers.
Upon completing the training, they are assigned a mentor who works with them for a month to ensure they can work independently. However, an unnamed senior Home Office source doubted whether the interim soldiers and civil servants had enough time to master all these skills.
Not only the holidays of people traveling to the UK are at stake. Air France cabin crew unions filed for strike action from December 22 to January 2. The flagship French carrier has yet to reach an accord with the trade unions UNAC and SNGAF over the new collective labor agreement. However, Air France is hoping to avoid delays and travel disruptions, it said.
The last collective labor agreement expired on October 30. Since then, the cabin crew has been working on a unilateral note, which allows the management to impose major labor conditions. Although the leadership team committed not to change the terms of the expired collective agreement, the unions insist on having a temporary contract to guarantee their benefits until a final deal is signed.
Strikes during winter holidays are more disruptive than usual as flights on other carriers are fully booked. Therefore, airlines try to strike deals with unions and avoid paying out thousands of compensations for canceled flights.
For instance, the Spanish airport operator Aena resumed paying the annual bonus after the trade unions threatened to protest from December 22 to January 6, Reuters reported last week.
