The pilots and crew members of commercial airlines definitively suspended the strike that they had been carrying out since last Monday in Brazil after accepting a new salary adjustment proposal made by the airlines, with an increase much lower than the one they claimed.
The National Union of Aeronauts (SNA), which represents pilots, co-pilots and flight attendants, reported that the last adjustment proposal made by the airlines, the third since the negotiations began, was approved by 70.1% of the 5,834 union members who participated in a virtual general assembly this Sunday afternoon.
“It was the longest strike we have carried out in the last 30 years. Now we accept the will of the majority and the stoppage is over,” SNA secretary general Clauver Castilho said in a video on Twitter released by the union.
The pilots carried out a strike of two hours a day between Monday and Friday of this week, between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. local time (between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. GMT), which caused dozens of delays and flight cancellations at the main airports. of Brazil, as well as lines of passengers in the terminals.
The pilots demanded that their salaries be corrected for the inflation of the last year, of about 5.97%, and that they be granted an additional real increase of 5 percentage points to replace the losses in salaries after 2 years without readjustment.
The proposal approved this Sunday provides for a salary readjustment of 6.97%, so it only corrects inflation and offers an additional real increase of 1.0%.
The pilots claimed that their salaries were not increased in 2020 and 2021 due to the crisis caused by the covid pandemic, which left planes on the ground for several weeks and caused millions in losses to the airlines, but that companies are currently recovering and profiting with high ticket prices.
“It may not sound like much, but it was a victory. We managed to bring improvements in the financial and social aspects, something that had not happened for a long time,” said the union’s president, Henrique Hacklaender.
The strike, in practice, ended on Friday because the union provisionally suspended it Saturday and Sunday while it analyzed the employer’s new proposal and in order not to harm the thousands of Brazilians with scheduled flights at Christmas.
The strike caused dozens of delays and numerous flight cancellations at nine of Brazil’s largest airports, mainly at the two in Sao Paulo, the country’s largest city and those with the most air traffic.
On Friday alone, the Congonhas airport, used for regional flights to and from Sao Paulo, had to cancel 14 flights and delay another 78. On the same day, the Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro, also for regional flights, registered 50 delays and 6 cancellations.
The stoppage also caused flight delays and generated long morning lines of passengers at the airports of Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza and Campinas.