BRUSSELS — A two-day strike by French air traffic controllers disrupted more than a thousand flights, and airlines are hopping mad over the millions of euros they’ve lost. “I’d be better if I wasn’t canceling 400 flights and 70,000 passengers just because a bunch of French air traffic controllers want to have recreational strikes,” Ryanair’s chief executive officer Michael O’Leary told POLITICO. The walkout “is extremely expensive for us. It costs us millions of euros,” said Benjamin Smith, the CEO of Air France-KLM Group, during a press call. The strike, which took place on Thursday and Friday, was over disputes between two unions and the French directorate general for civil aviation regarding understaffing and the introduction of a new biometric time clock system to monitor air traffic controllers’ work attendance. Airlines are increasingly angry over the frequent French strikes that regularly upend their schedules. “There’s no shortage of air traffic controllers in France. The real issue is that they don’t roster them particularly well,” O’Leary said, adding that the French controllers “are just badly managed.” The strike “is a horrible image for France, for customers at the beginning of the summer vacation season coming into this wonderful country, to be faced with either delayed or canceled flights,” Smith added. “It’s not something that you see in the rest of Europe.” Unions have long complained about structural understaffing of air traffic controllers. Staffing shortages played a role in a near-collision between an easyJet plane and a private jet at the Bordeaux airport in December 2022, according to French investigators. They found that three controllers were working in the tower at the time of the incident instead of the six required by the duty roster. This week’s walkout was called by France’s second-largest air traffic controllers’ union, UNSA-ICNA; it was joined by the USAC-CGT, the third-largest union. According to AFP, some 270 controllers out of 1,400 participated in the strike on Thursday. The airlines also accused France of failing to protect planes flying over the country during these actions, which cause disruption throughout Europe. “It is indefensible that today that I’m canceling flights from Ireland to Italy, from Germany to Spain, from Portugal to Poland,” O’Leary said.  The budget airline chief blamed the European Union, and specifically European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, for the situation. O’Leary said that of Ryanair’s 400 cancellations caused by the strike, “360, or 90 percent of those flights, would operate if the Commission protected the overflights as Spain, Italy and Greece do during air traffic control strikes.” “Von der Leyen and the Commission made a big song and dance during Brexit about: ‘We must protect the single market, the single market is sacrosanct, nothing would be allowed to disrupt the single market,’” he said. “Unless you’re a French air traffic controller and you can shut down the sky over France.” “Ursula von der Leyen, being the useless politician that she is, would rather sit in her office in Brussels, pontificating about Palestine or U.S. trade agreements or anything else. Anything but take any effective action to protect the flights of holidaymakers,” O’Leary said after calling for von der Leyen to quit unless she can reform European air traffic control. Von der Leyen is under fire for various actions and even faces a confidence vote in European Parliament next week. The European Commission did not respond to Ryanair’s statement, but transport spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen insisted that air traffic control issues are “on the Commission’s radar.” But “air traffic controlling, per international and EU legislation, it’s the responsibility of member states and countries generally,” she added during a press briefing. “We fully acknowledge the legitimate right of strikes in member states, but it is an issue that is to be addressed more broadly,” Itkonen said, responding to a question on airlines’ requests to overfly countries during strikes.

BRUSSELS — All commercial flights to and from Belgium on Thursday have been canceled as air traffic controllers plan to join a nationwide strike against the new government. The controllers’ walkout will begin at 6:45 a.m. and lasts until 10:15 p.m., public broadcaster RTBF reported, halting all air traffic below 7,500 meters at Brussels, Charleroi, Liège, Antwerp and Ostend airports. The cancelation of all departing flights from Brussels and Charleroi was announced on Monday due to a planned walkout by baggage handling and security staff. The ACV Transcom union later announced that air traffic controllers would also protest in solidarity with other workers most affected by the Belgian government’s new plan to cut costs in public services, including a pension reform. Rescue and medical flights will continue operating during the strike.

A national strike in Belgium is set to heavily disrupt public transport in Brussels on Monday, as well as rail and air travel. Belgian trade unions have called a general strike on Jan. 13 to protest against government plans for pension reform. The capital city’s public transport network will be “severely disrupted,” according to a warning by STIB, the company managing the Brussels metro, tram and bus services. People needing to travel within the city are advised to find alternatives, it said. Trains across the country will also be impacted, with only one in three running between major cities, according to a statement by the national rail service SNCB. In addition, travelers planning to fly through Brussels airport run a high risk of seeing their flights canceled, warned Brussels Airlines.

BRUSSELS — A law setting rules on how truckers operate set off an east-west battle between European Union member countries and laid bare a profound conflict at the heart of the bloc’s internal market. On Friday, the EU’s highest court will decide who’s in the right. The Court of Justice of the EU is delivering a long-awaited ruling on 15 overlapping legal challenges targeting a collection of reforms known as the Mobility Package. The reforms aimed to improve truck drivers’ lives and tackle unfair competition practices with new rules on driver rest times, their right to local salary levels and their ability to circulate within other countries to carry out deliveries. The package was viewed very differently depending on which part of the EU was doing the looking. For many West European countries, it was a strategy to prevent the EU’s free movement from undermining worker rights. Many Central Europeans, in contrast, saw it as an effort to protect western trucking companies at the expense of shipping firms from new member countries. Seven EU members sued; many more intervened in court. Rarely has a law “given rise to such a grouped and intense contentious reaction at EU level,” a top court adviser, Advocate General Giovanni Pitruzzella, noted in his November opinion. He warned that the debate raises “the risk of a split between two visions of the European Union … on an issue that is fundamental to the internal market.” In his opinion, Pitruzzella suggested ditching an obligation to regularly return trucks to their registered base — something welcomed by Lithuania and Malta.  But French, German and Nordic industry groups argued the advocate general didn’t find fault with the content of the measure and warned that scrapping it would “open the door to more social dumping and nomadic driving in Europe.” Now — four years after the package’s adoption and more than seven years after it was first proposed — the court gets a say. It’s under no obligation to echo an advocate general’s opinion, but it often does. A little refresher may be in order. Here’s what you need to know. 1. WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT? The Mobility Package includes several reforms to improve truckers’ — undeniably tough — working conditions. The new measures banned drivers from taking long rests in their cabins and mandated their regular return home. It also introduced new restrictions on pickups and drop-offs within other EU countries, known as cabotage. The most controversial measure demands that trucks return to their company’s registered base at least once every eight weeks.  That was an effort to prevent so-called letterbox companies from registering in low-cost countries despite operating on a near-permanent basis on the other side of the Continent. But on the bloc’s periphery, that was seen as a protectionist measure to cut them out of the internal market and saddle their transport sectors with millions in added costs. Even the European Commission questioned the measure after its adoption, eliciting fresh outrage from negotiators. Now-outgoing Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean went as far as preparing plans to scrap it. 2. WHY IT MATTERS Trucks carrying goods from one country to the next will typically combine that international delivery with other deliveries along the way to bring down costs and avoid empty runs. But when foreign truckers pick up and deliver goods within another country, they’re also doing a transport job that could have been carried out by a local company. As a result, the debate about the mistreatment and unequal remuneration standards of truck drivers has become intertwined with discussions about unfair competition. 3. WHY IT WAS SO POLITICALLY DIVISIVE In EU lawmaking, negotiators’ positions can often be traced back to their political affiliation or the European Parliament’s typically more ambitious stance. But in the long-running talks on the Mobility Package, Council of the EU and Parliament negotiators — and even commissioners — split along geographic lines. It took negotiators years to find a carefully crafted deal that passed muster with enough countries. Take one piece of the puzzle out and the whole thing could come crashing down, they have warned. 4. WHO’S INVOLVED? Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus, Hungary, Malta and Poland lodged a total of 15 challenges with the court. Estonia and Latvia, the two other countries which voted against the package, added their support to some of those challenges. Belgium backed Malta in its challenge of one measure. Other countries, including Germany, Italy, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and Austria, banded together in a France-led “road alliance” and turned to the court in defense of the legislation. 5. IT’S BIGGER THAN TRANSPORT Countries supporting the package called for measures to improve truckers’ work conditions, framing it as an effort to halt a broader “race to the bottom” across the sector. Their warnings centered on worries that the bloc’s free-movement rules could harm social rights and erode support for the EU. They argued that cheaper workers moving from poorer EU countries undermine the working conditions of their own drivers. But countries questioning the reform saw that as protectionism. They complained that older EU countries treated the European project’s promise of free competition in a common EU market as something they’d only defend if it was to their advantage. That makes the stakes very high. “Over and above the legal issues at stake, it is therefore also, in a way, the pursuit of a desire to live together on common economic and social foundations that is at stake in these actions,” Pitruzzella cautioned in his opinion.

BRUSSELS — If you want to fly out of the Belgian capital on Tuesday, you better have a backup plan.  Both Brussels Zaventem and Brussels South Charleroi airports will be massively disrupted by a nationwide strike by security, cleaning and catering staff.  Last Friday, Brussels Airport announced the cancellation of all departing flights for Tuesday. In its latest update issued Monday and shared with POLITICO, the airport said that “around 42,000 passengers (32,000 departing and 10,000 arriving) are affected by the strike” and that it expects “14,000 arriving passengers tomorrow (instead of the 24,000 initially planned).” Cargo operations, on the other hand, should be relatively unaffected by the strike, the airport assured. About 200 flights have been canceled by Brussels Airlines alone — the Belgian subsidiary of Lufthansa Group — which said in an emailed statement that it had 21,000 passengers booked for Oct. 1. Arriving flights are “still possible,” the airline added.  “Arriving passenger flights may operate, but cancellations are likely,” Brussels Airport said on its website. On Monday, Charleroi airport was also forced to cancel all departing flights on Tuesday — after initially announcing it would keep capacity at 30 percent of scheduled flights.  However, it said that all incoming flights will be operated. The updated decision was made because too few security staff will be working during the strike to operate flights, a spokesperson told the Belgian press. It’s not the first disruption for the airport. On Sept. 12, Charleroi airport was hit by a surprise strike which led to the cancellation of all flights and continued disruptions in the following days.  Ryanair, the largest operator at Charleroi, Belgium’s second-busiest airport, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the upcoming strike at the airport. Tuesday’s strike was called as part of the European trade union campaign against what it called a  “race to the bottom” in working conditions for essential workers — including cleaners, security guards and food service employees. One of the main goals of the protest — which will also see cleaning and security workers from nine European countries coming to Brussels— is to have a say in the revision of the EU’s public procurement directive announced by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.  “Unions are calling for new rules to strengthen collective bargaining, uplift working conditions and ensure quality services for communities,” said the union federation UNI Europa.  Brussels Airport workers, who will gather in front of the airport on Tuesday at 10 a.m., are complaining about high workloads, lack of maintenance of airport infrastructure, “inappropriate temperatures” in the workplace, poor public transport and expensive parking. “In short, we are left out in the cold while the airport operator makes millions in profits every year,” said a statement from the ACV Puls union. “We have a contractual relationship with a number of external service providers,” said a spokesperson for Brussels Airport, noting “these are selected on the basis of tenders, which include price and quality criteria.” “As part of these calls for tender, we ensure that these employees are remunerated in accordance with the scales applicable in their respective sectors,” the spokesperson said, adding that disputes should be settled at the “service provider level.”