Here in the local area of Germany that I live (around Wiesbaden-Frankfurt)....the FRAPORT or Frankfurt Airport is considered one of the biggest employers of the region. If you consider everyone connected to it.....from the official side, it's around 70k people.
Yesterday, word came out that 'slips' are being prepared, and 4,000 employees will be permanently let go. Yep, it's kind of a shocker.
At the beginning of 2020...lots of hype. The airport had been on a four-decade roll...tons of business going on. Enthusiasm everywhere. Then Covid-19 occurs.
For the most part, terminal two (the newer terminal) has been completely shutdown....there's simply not enough business to keep it going. The necessity for terminal three, which is being built right now? That's a big question. They may finish it, and just lock the doors because there's not enough flights to operate it.
The 4k being let go? They come every single part of the operation, from safety to sanitation. Some will have unique skills, which will help them get employed easily. Some will have unique skills, which aren't needed anywhere in the Frankfurt region, or for that matter....the rest of Germany.
If you think the cut here is the only one.....I would expect the same thing at Hamburg, Berlin, Munich, and Koln.....just in lesser in numbers.
Having a snowball effect? In this region, a job at FRAPORT was regarded as a 'golden' ticket. You could walk into a bank, get a house loan, and things were great. Now? I would expect at least a quarter of this 4,000 to have mortgages and are deep into worry about the next job, or if they have to hand the keys to the house over to the bank.
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"In this region, a job at FRAPORT was regarded as a 'golden' ticket. You could walk into a bank, get a house loan, and things were great. Now? I would expect at least a quarter of this 4,000 to have mortgages and are deep into worry about the next job, or if they have to hand the keys to the house over to the bank. "
In the late 1990s, I worked as a contract programmer at Brown & Williamson (cigarette makers in Macon, Georgia (USA)) for five years. Their employees had the same "golden" ticket. Many husband and wife teams, some whole families, worked there. The word in town was that if the customer wore a brown B&W shirt, he/she got anything they wanted.
I left when my contract expired. About five years later, B&W (headquartered in the UK) shut down the plant and left. The ripple effect cost another 9,000 to 14,000 jobs in the region. Many who I knew there carried a huge debt load as the wages were around $26 an hour (the area's norm was $13) and "would last forever".
LOTS of bankruptcies, and Macon never recovered. I suspect that on a lesser scale, something similar will happen to Frankfurt.
There's a lesson in there somewhere.
In this case, for over 50 years, the FRAPORT folks would talk of a 5-gain in passenger/cargo traffic almost every three years. Expansion plans? Even at the end of 2019, they had all kinds of plans on the board for the next decade. My take is that this is a two-to-three year down period, and recovery eventually coming back by 2023. Amazingly enough, terminal two is completely non-op (with the McDonalds and Burger King) presently and probably won't be opened back until spring/summer of 2021.
From my balcony (way across the valley), I can certainly say that nightly landings have doubled in the past two weeks....course, it was a marginal number a month ago, so I might only be talking about another dozen planes per hour.
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