Pilots, cabin crew and aircraft mechanics employed at the state-owned national flag carrier Croatia Airlines will go on strike on Wednesday, August 8 at 6.00, the Croatia Airlines’ workers’ union ORCA said on Friday.

“We regret that the Prime Minister had failed to fulfil his side of the deal and that we are forced to again announce a strike, on August 8, with the beginning at 6 o’clock in the morning. We want to stress once again that this was the last thing we wanted to do, but since the owners’ representatives failed to act after the last agreement, we unfortunately have no other options,” ORCA said.

Union representatives had met with Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic on July 6, just days before a previously announced strike was scheduled to begin. The representatives had said after the meeting that an agreement was reached with Plenkovic, who promised that all the necessary conditions for fulfilling the workers’ demands would be met soon.

After receiving assurances from Plenkovic, the union had postponed the strike to allow for a reasonable amount of time for the conditions to be met.

The primary issue concerns appointing the new management which would make it possible to finally sign a new collective agreement, after the last one had expired nearly 20 months ago. The workers are also demanding an increase in salaries and a reduction of overtime hours assigned to employees.

Croatia Airlines has been without a CEO since September 2016, when the contract of the last CEO, Kresimir Kucko, had expired.

The company’s current management said that the airline could suffer losses of up to €800,000 a day during the duration of the strike, adding it will also affect nearly 7,000 passengers on just the first day.

The management also said that the claim that salaries have not gone up was untrue, “because the old collective agreement continued to be implemented and, depending on time spent working at the company, the salaries did go up, four times for the cabin crew for example, the last time on July 1.”

They appealed to the unions and all employees to once again think about what a strike at this time of year would mean, and what would be the consequences of such a decision.

The strike could cause chaos in air traffic in the middle of the tourist season. Transport Minister Oleg Butkovic said on Friday that “it will be very difficult for Croatia Airlines to survive the strike.”

The company simply cannot earmark almost 53 million kuna (€7.1 million) a year, the amount necessary to fulfil the unions’ demands, the management said.

“The ORCA union has twice, once at the end of 2017 and again in 2018, refused the offers of a 2.5 percent salary increase, on top of other bonuses. This refusal, unfortunately, means losses for all the Croatia Airlines employees,” they added.

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