The 1,179 Groundforce staff who handle check in, boarding, baggage and flight coordination at Barcelona El Prat began an open ended strike this week. Twenty flights were cancelled on the first day and eighteen on the second. Set against El Prat in August that is a small number, and the reason it is small is written into the rules rather than into the level of support for the stoppage.
The transport ministry sets minimum service levels, and they are not uniform. Flights between the peninsula and the Balearics, the Canaries, Ceuta and Melilla are guaranteed at 80 percent, because for those routes there is no alternative. International and cross peninsular flights where the alternative journey would take more than five hours are held at 58 percent. Domestic flights with an alternative under five hours sit at 35 percent. In other words the state protects the routes where passengers are most stranded, and lets the pressure fall on the ones where a train exists.
That structure decides what a strike like this can actually do. The handlers' leverage is concentrated on short domestic routes in the middle of a summer when roughly two million passengers are expected through the disruption window, which is enough to be painful for travellers and not obviously enough to move a company that has already sat through one stoppage this year.
The grievances are the familiar ones of ground handling and they are physical. The unions cite deteriorating health and safety conditions, physical exhaustion, psychological strain, unpaid overtime and rest periods that are not long enough to be rest. Esther Garcia, speaking for the strike committee, said management had shown itself unwilling to resolve the conflict and that the walkout was a last resort after negotiations went nowhere.
CCOO, UGT and USO called it, the same three that called a stoppage in March over the same complaints, which is the part worth noting. A repeat strike five months later is not a negotiating tactic, it is evidence that the first one settled nothing. A separate Swissport strike at Palma was called off, so for now the disruption is Barcelona's alone.