At Swiss they miscalculated: In early summer, 334 flight attendants were employed by the Lufthansa subsidiary quit – But now you get into a mess with the airline, because there are no crew members. A major reason for this is likely to be the mandatory vaccination.
This was announced in autumn and came into force at the beginning of December. Swiss obviously assumed that the vast majority of employees would submit to the compulsory vaccination in order to keep their jobs. But one has miscalculated: According to information from Blick.ch there are almost 200 flight attendants who refused to be vaccinated – much more than expected.
According to the head of the cabin crew, Sandrine Nikolic-Fuss, for a long time it was foreseeable that there would be too few staff: the layoffs in early summer were unnecessary from the start. The airline is now trying to persuade the flight attendants who had previously been dismissed to return. So it says in a message:
All colleagues we had to part with as part of the restructuring measures will be contacted by HR in January 2022 with the offer of a right of return from April 2022
It remains to be seen whether these employees are all vaccinated and are therefore allowed to work at Swiss at all. The airline had been on top of that before bad working conditions caused negative headlines. So it remains to be seen how many flight attendants will even accept the offer to return.