Page 11 - STAT August 2022 for Magzter

and cancelled owing to a shortage of industry also managed to lose thousands
crew and ground handling staff. of workers during the pandemic leading
As a result of these disruptions, the bot- to a "severe shortage" of skilled ground
tom lines of airlines are expected to take a handlers to move goods. This was owing
hit and the reduced capacity from cargo to layoffs, or workers moving into other
holds is set to derail the sector and lead to occupations and finding or seeking flex-
inflation in air freight prices. ible work options.
Kim Winter, Global CEO, Logistics Execu- As per a ‘Covid-19 Analysis Fact Sheet’
tive Group, says the service levels in the by the Aviation Benefits Without Borders
industry are not expected to return until portal, as of September 2021, 44.6 million
the second quarter of 2023 at least. He said, jobs were deemed to be “at risk” and
Cargo “This is an industry which is high contact, subsequently fall, from those that were
operations in customer-facing, where delivery is time normally supported by aviation.
Further, the report cited that there was
critical, it requires long hours, quite often
some key it is thankless, has repetitive tasks, is often a -50% reduction in the employment
dangerous and challenging at times. And it supported between the pre-Covid and
hubs have is not work that you can do from home. It post-Covid (end of 2021) period across
experienced a has to do with handling freight, passengers, the world. Among the hardest hit would
be Asia Pacific ( -58%), Africa (-51%), the
and time-critical shipments. Now those
shortage of staff people had to go and get employment in Middle East (-47%), Latin America and
other industries due to the pandemic and Caribbean region (-43%), Europe (-40%),
which has had an don't want to go back into aviation as they and North America (-34%).
The report also cited that direct aviation
impact in some found it to be stressful. So essentially a lot jobs (at airlines, airports, manufacturers,
of people who left the industry during the
cases on flights pandemic were disillusioned.” and air traffic management) will fall by 2.3
million (a 21% reduction compared with
not being able to Spillover effect the pre-pandemic situation).
“Cargo operations in some key hubs have
be loaded. The disillusionment is real with the avia- experienced a shortage of staff which has
tion sector reportedly seeing 2.3 million
Glyn Hughes job losses globally during the pandemic, had an impact in some cases in flights not
TIACA with jobs related to ground handling and being able to be loaded. In particular, the
security making up the majority. Accord- Chinese policy of zero tolerance for Covid
ing to the International Air cases has had an adverse impact on staff
Transport Association availability. In other countries, staff short-
(IATA), the cargo ages have been caused by lack of qualified
handling staff applying for vacant positions but more
impactful has been the delays experienced
in getting staff approved by the appropri-
ate authorities in terms of security checks
and certification,” Glyn Hughes,
Director General of The Interna-
tional Air Cargo Associa-
tion (TIACA) told The
STAT Trade Times.

www.stattimes.com | AUGUST 2022 9