Every e-commerce giant's nightmare: during the busiest time of the year, the pilots of the airline delivering your freight decide to go on strike. It happened to Amazon. A US judge has since temporarily banned the strike, but the union disagrees.
ABX Air is an airline that provides flights for Amazon.com and DHL Express, among others. Every day, subsidiary Air Transport Services Group carries about 35 freights for the etail giant and another 35 for DHL Express. The subsidiary's pilots have resigned because they say they have been facing high workloads due to pilot shortages for two years. ABX Air has since hired a small number of relatively inexperienced (and therefore cheap) pilots. Insufficient, according to the union. Pilots would regularly be called up in their spare time to fly on so-called 'emergency assignments' anyway.
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The strike is big trouble for a company like Amazon, which experiences the busiest period of the year with Black Friday and Christmas. Dor the strike there could be shortages in stocks in the US and Europe.
This was also realised by parent company ABX Air, which went to court to suspend the strike. According to the company, a continued strike leads to major and irreparable damage to ABX and international trade in general. The court agreed with the airline in this, but according to the union, that is precisely the whole idea behind a strike. The union considers it undesirable for a judge to take into account the damage caused to the company by a strike and therefore argues that the strike is perfectly legal. A spokesman for the union has since reported that the pilots will return to work, just in time for Black Friday, and that the union will continue to fight against the high workload in the meantime.
Editorial team LogistiekProfs
