The first reinstatement and compensation payment processes for the 700 that the Flight Staff Union is preparing will be filed in court. TAP risks paying 300 million.
The National Union of Civil Aviation Flight Personnel (SNPVAC) will proceed to court, by the end of the year, with the first legal actions of the 700 processes of reinstatement and payment of compensation to TAP cabin crew, referring to situations that occurred between 2005 and 2024. The initiative comes after the decision of the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) on reimbursements to crew members, which became final, which ruled in favor of the crew fired after a long legal tussle with TAP.
“We are starting the démarches, in the bureaucratic and legal phase, to enter the courts by the end of the year the first cases of the 700 that are in the pipeline. The Supreme Court’s decision gave another weight to these actions”, the president of SNPVAC, Ricardo Penarróias, told JE.
The STJ rejected TAP’s complaint about the reinstatement and payment of compensation to some cabin crew laid off during the pandemic, a process that could cost the airline millions of euros at a time when the privatization process has begun. At issue is the Supreme Court’s decision, known at the end of last year and maintained in the final ruling, regarding some cabin crew contracts that had been dismissed as part of the company’s restructuring plan being poorly founded. The Supreme Court, which analyzed layoff processes between 2019 and 2021, considered that they should be included as permanent employees and entitled to compensation, in a decision relating to four crew members, but could serve as a basis for hundreds of professionals in the same situation.
This sentence, announced in December 2024, considered null the rule in the company agreement that discriminated against workers with fixed-term contracts in terms of remuneration and salary evolution compared to permanent workers.
In June, the Supreme Administrative Court declared this rule invalid, determining that fixed-term crew members should be classified in the “CAB I” category and receive the corresponding remuneration. Given that some of these crew members were supposed to be part of the company’s staff, some layoffs that occurred during the pandemic were also considered irregular.
Constitutional denies appeal to TAP and confirms compensation
The union announced, on September 29, that the Constitutional Court (TC) had rejected TAP’s appeal in the process regarding reimbursements to around 2,000 crew members that the airline laid off during the covid-19 pandemic, not renewing their fixed-term employment contracts. But the airline could still file a complaint within ten days, which ended up not happening. With TAP not complaining for the second time about a TC decision, the sentence became definitive and could no longer be challenged on appeal. The TC’s decision is unifying and applies to cases that have already been filed in court, as well as another 700 that will be filed soon and another 1,300 crew members who have had fixed-term contracts with TAP since 2006. At the end of October, SNPVAC said, in the statement, that the way was open for the company to pay up to 300 million euros in compensation and that it would appeal to the courts of first instance “with the with the intention of forcing the company to correct the inevitable”.
To JE, Ricardo Penarróias highlights that “the union made several warnings to previous governments and the current one, and why didn’t they want to pay before going to court? They pushed this situation as far as possible so that someone could later pay that invoice.”
It is worth remembering that, following the pandemic and the restructuring plan, between March 2020 and March 2021, 1,514 people left the company. By the beginning of this year, 925 workers from various professional classes had been readmitted, to whom compensation totaling 1.74 million euros had been paid.
