Frankfurt Airport has dropped plans to employ up to 2,000 temporary airport staff from Turkey to ease disruption saying the workers lacked the necessary skills.
Lufthansa’s most important hub airport, Frankfurt has been at the centre of aviation disruption in Germany with thousands of flights cancelled this summer due to staff shortages the same as in Britain.
The German aviation industry association (BDL) called on the government to allow the hiring of temporary non-EU workers in June.
Federal ministers agreed, dropping the usual rules on recruiting non-EU labour.
In late June, the German government announced plans to fast-track work permits and visas for several thousand foreign airport workers, mainly from Turkey.
Background security checks on the workers were still expected to take six weeks, meaning the staff would be deployed from mid-August.
The BDL urged the government to speed up the checks, saying: “We hope it will happen very quickly.”
But Frankfurt Airport operator Fraport announced last week it would not be deploying temporary workers from Turkey after all.
It said the staff offered by a Turkish personnel provider did not have the necessary qualifications and the cost of training them to work for just three months was not justified.
Just 150 airport workers from Turkey will now be deployed at German airports, at Munich and Nuremberg, working as baggage handlers through to early November, the aviation ground handlers’ association, the ABL, reported.
A Fraport spokesperson said Frankfurt’s airport operations had stabilised and it was making its own recruitment efforts, with more than 1,000 staff hired since the start of the year.
The head of the German Airports Association (ADV) reported in July that one fifth of operational staff at airports were missing
Lufthansa was forced to cut 2,200 flights in July and August and a further 600 in the first half of September after axing 900 in mid-June. The airline has been reported as already axing services from its winter schedule.