The majority of members of the Aeropers pilots' union have rejected the collective labor agreement negotiated by Swiss management and employee representatives. The airline regrets the decision of the pilots and is currently examining how to proceed.

The management of the Lufthansa subsidiary assumes that the result of the vote will have no impact on the stability of air traffic. The members of the Aeropers pilots' association have rejected the collective labor agreement (GAV2022) agreed by Swiss International Air Lines and the Aeropers board with 80,5 percent of the votes cast. The result was announced today by Aeropers after a two-week commenting and voting phase for the members

“The negotiated GAV2022 represented a compromise which, from our point of view, took the interests of SWISS and Aeropers into account in a balanced manner. With one assumption, the new GAV would have offered contractual stability for the next four years in a very volatile airline environment," explains Oliver Buchhofer, Head of Operations and member of the extended Executive Board of Swiss. "We regret the result of the vote, but of course we respect this majority decision."

The airline announced that the situation that has existed since April 1, 2022 will be continued without a collective labor agreement. "A new, sustainable GAV for our cockpit staff remains an option," says Buchhofer. “For this, however, we need a reliable negotiating partner. It is a novelty in the social partnership between Swiss and the pilots' association that the Aeropers board, after several months of intensive negotiations, did not recommend the jointly developed and signed CLA to their members for acceptance".

With the exception of the cockpit staff, all Swiss personnel groups have concluded multi-year crisis agreements. Discussions with Aeropers about such an agreement ended unsuccessfully at the end of 2020. Against this background, the airline had terminated the current CLA effective March 2021, 31 at the beginning of February 2022 and called on Aeropers to negotiate a new collective labor agreement.