About a quarter of flights scheduled for Thursday morning at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport were canceled due to a strike by airport employees to demand higher wages, Aéroports de Paris (ADP) said.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) asked airlines to reduce the number of their flights between 7am and 2pm on Thursday, as several European airports recently faced great difficulties in managing passengers due to a lack of staff.

Air France, the main operator of the Paris Charles de Gaulle hub, announced that it canceled 85 short and medium-haul flights on Thursday to meet DGAC requirements.

The company added that “schedule changes for long-distance flights” are also planned, specifying that “relevant customers will be contacted directly.”

All unions at Roissy Airport (CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC, CFE-CGC, Unsa and SUD) are calling on all platform employees to mobilize to demand a €300 salary increase “for all unconditionally”.

“Despite resuming traffic and profits, our work is not being paid at its fair value,” the unions are furious in a joint post. And they denounced “everything increases except for our wages.”

For FO, “the chaos that employees have been experiencing for several weeks at many airport platforms in France and Europe is unbearable.” The union estimates that 15,000 jobs have been lost in two years in the aviation sector due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to “worker stress”.

At the end of April, the head of the ADP announced that 4,000 jobs would be filled at the Orly and Roissy airport platforms, facing significant staffing problems.

After two years of pandemic-related deficits, air traffic is resuming at full speed in Europe and is gradually returning to its 2019 levels.

At some European airports, staff shortages have already caused major chaos, such as in Amsterdam-Schiphol or Frankfurt, where flights have been canceled in recent weeks due to a shortage of ground staff.

In the UK, hundreds of flights were canceled last week for the same reason.