France: two agreements signed at Airbus to avoid employment losses in the commercial aircraft production business

The Airbus' Commercial Aircraft business has been abruptly halted by the crisis in air transport. Several tens of thousands of job cuts globally were planned before the summer, including just over 4,000 in France. After an initial round of discussions on the scope of this redundancy plan, French management and trade unions agreed to negotiate cost-cutting measures in order to reduce or even cancel the planned layoffs. As a result of these discussions, on 12 October two agreements were secured with the group’s majority trade unions, the FO, CFTC and CFE-CGC. The signatories are relying on a combination of the mobilization of the recently created form of short-time working known as ‘long-term short-time’ (l’activité partielle longue durée (APLD)), voluntary departures, and employee redeployment, in order to avoid social breakdown.