Finnair Lays Off 280

The odds are good that you probably have not heard much about Finnair unless you do a lot of flying in Europe, but for those of you who are not jet setters the company is a short range airline based out of Helsinki, which flies primarily in Europe. The company is getting ready to get rid of  280 of its workers in order to make itself more profitable. The 280 workers to be cut will come from the Mechanics and Technical personnel  of the airline.

If 280 cuts do not seem like much, after some of the truly massive cuts at other airlines then bear in mind that these divisions only employed 350 people to being with, so these cuts will get rid of more than half of the staff that were maintaining these aircrafts.

The company released the following statement about the job cuts :

“On April 11th at 13:00 hours LT Finnair Mechanics and Technical personnel have started a labor action due to Finnair’s plans of outsourcing some technical services. The personnel shall return back to work on Friday April 13th at 06:00 LT.

Please check the departure and arrival times in Flight status. We are following the situation closely and will update any new information on this page.

If there are changes to our flights, we will do our best to contact the passengers directly. Please check from My booking that we have your current contact information.

If your flight is cancelled, you can change the travel dates within the validity of the ticket or get a full refund of the ticket fare.

For more information, please contact our customer service. We are sorry that due to the exceptional situation our customer service may be congested.

Finnair Customer Service”

Of course these kinds of cuts are happening all over the airline industry and many of the smaller carriers have been  forced to make cuts in order to stay in the game. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is a look at other cuts to a smaller airline:

“Some of you may recall our earlier coverage of the soon to be layoffs at Kingfisher Air, an India-based airline that is having some serious finical troubles at the current moment.

At the time the company was not releasing a lot of details about their impending job cuts. We now know, from reliable sources, that the company is getting ready to layoff about 500 of its workers. Yes, you read that right 500 workers, or about half of the company’s overall workforce is going to get the flush in order to help the company to right its current problems with debt.

The company, which has been in trouble for some time for failure to pay fees to the government and to oil companies, as well as changing flight plans without proper notice to authorities, must now dig its way out of a very deep hole. If they cannot make progress and begin to pay off their fees and debts then they will very likely be shut down by the government.”