Strike at Air Tahiti widens and continues to hamper territory

Transcript

A strike at Air Tahiti has spread to other companies in French Polynesia, which further hampers air travel.   

Flights have been cut for two weeks now and as redundancies are likely, more employees of related industries have joined the strike, which has affected the entire archipelago.

Lucy Smith spoke to Publisher of Tahiti Pacifique magazine Alex du Prel who claims the unions are causing the stoppages to show the power they have on the economy. 

Alex du Prel: Apparently we have unions who just don't want to negotiate and they've extended the strike and it looks like they're trying to copy what's happening in France. 

Lucy Smith: Why are the people striking? 

AP: It's like most unions, they say the work is too tiring, and the main reason at the beginning was we don't have too many tourists and they want to cut out some flights around to the outer islands. Because of this reduction of flights they wanted to reduce the employment time of employees, lets say before they use to have one plane a week, and now they want to make it one plane every two weeks.  Of course the employees would have their salaries reduced within accordance of working and reduction times. No other jobs on these islands unless you pick up coconuts.  The way it turns out now, it's a strike between the government and union. But it's more like a sabotage right now. We're in a dire crisis in French Polynesia we have a very large part of the population unemployed 50% of the young people. It's a power-play between the union and the government. It has an affect on tourism. 

LS: Who do these strikes mainly affect is it more locals or tourism? 

AP: No no it affects tourism because everyone flies in Tahiti.  It has quite some effect on tourism everybody flies to Tahiti and then they fly on to Bora Bora, etc, so when you block the centre you block everything. and many of the airline employees don't follow the strikes so they've been able to maintain around 30 to 40 percent of the flights to get these people out so they don't miss there planes back home. It's very apparent what the unions are doing they're expanding and trying to hurt the economy.