Air France is in a fragile financial condition but its renationalisation is not on the agenda, Transport Minister Alain Vidalies said on Tuesday, a day after violence by employees interrupted a meeting about drastic cost cuts. <\/p>\n
Speaking after images of a human resources manager with his shirt ripped off were shown around the world’s media, he also said the day’s events amounted to a “caricature” of France that was unhelpful to the airline’s future. <\/p>\n
“This image, we can put it right by a firm and unanimous condemnation of what happened. I have said it. The Prime Minister (Manuel Valls) said it yesterday,” he said on RTL Radio. <\/p>\n
“I think the best French response would be to respond to those abroad who see a caricature, that these events are not France, and that we can get back on track by talking,” he said. <\/p>\n
A security guard was left unconscious for several hours on Monday as angry employees broke up a works council meeting. <\/p>\n
The meeting had been called to outline an accelerated plan for 2,900 job cuts and a 10 percent reduction in long-haul flights after failure to secure pilot agreement on a less drastic set of cutbacks. <\/p>\n
Air France has launched a legal complaint over the incident, which has been condemned by management, unions, and government officials alike. Vidalies said there should be penalties for those involved. <\/p>\n
Vidalies defended the management’s plans for the airline, saying: “On the stock market front, its market value has shrunk to 2 billion (euros) from 7 billion, so it’s a company that is fragile.” <\/p>\n
Asked whether the government should intervene more directly in the dispute given its 17 percent stake in the business, Vidalies said nationalisation was not on the cards. <\/p>\n
“That (stake) is the result of history…. The state is a shareholder (but) we are not in a situation today where the solution will be nationalisation of Air France. If it is that behind your question, then the answer is no.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Air France is in a fragile financial condition but its renationalisation is not on the agenda, Transport Minister Alain Vidalies said on Tuesday, a day after violence by employees interrupted a meeting about drastic cost cuts. Speaking after images of a human resources manager with his shirt ripped off were shown around the world’s media, he also said the day’s events amounted to a “caricature” of France that was unhelpful to the airline’s future. “This image, we can put it right by a firm and unanimous condemnation of what happened. I have said it. The Prime Minister (Manuel Valls) said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}