In the Swiss media, employees of the holiday airline Chair raise serious allegations against their employer. These are strongly reminiscent of a low-cost airline that is often in the crossfire of criticism. Chair rejects the allegations made.
Among other things, a member of the cabin crew complained that the basic salary should be CHF 2.500 per month, which is below the industry average. Travel Inside and the Sunday newspaper also report that there is a kind of fear culture including spying and that flight attendants would also go to work out of fear out of fear.
Opposite Blick, it is even claimed that cabin crews who were particularly busy during the pandemic and are now to be replaced by cheaper workers from abroad have been dismissed in the last few days. The Polish charter airline Enter Air holds 49 percent of Chair.
Company boss Shpend Ibrahimi confirms that there were three redundancies in July 2021, but makes it clear that nine additional employees were previously hired in June 2021. The Chair's managing director rejects any connection with the deployment during the pandemic.
Chair CEO: “Allegations are unfounded”
Opposite Blick, an employee who was already working for the carrier during the Germania era alleges that there should be a real culture of fear. The senior flight attendants should write reports after each flight and document failures of the employees in these. There should be an instruction from the airline's cabin chief. CEO Ibrahimi does not want to leave the allegations standing and emphasizes that the head of the cabin crew would “do good and highly qualified work” and “the allegations regarding the working conditions are completely out of thin air”.
The chair boss also rejects the fact that employees have to show up sick to work. In this context, the flight attendant alleged that there had been an oral instruction that one should fly sick, otherwise one would get “problems”. According to Ibrahimi, this should not be true.
He only confirmed the fact that the cabin crew occasionally also has to clean the machines. In doing so, he points out that this would occur in places where one has to rely on the machines to be lifted off again quickly. This is generally not unusual, because with some competitors, the cabins are not cleaned by a cleaning crew after each flight, but the flight attendants carry out tidying up and rough cleaning work.