Aviation was one of the worst-hit industries during Covid – and ground handlers in particular are continuing to struggle post-pandemic with recruitment and retention. As air traffic bounces back, and projections for growth remain optimistic, William Hallowell explores the challenge ahead
Among the challenges that the aviation industry must navigate today, recruitment and retention remain perhaps the most significant. The consensus view on this particular issue is that “the pandemic is to blame”.
Indeed, Covid changed much for aviation. For three years, aircraft were grounded and only in 2024 were there reports of demand for air travel returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Is ground handling now unattractive?
Ground handlers in particular lost a lot of manpower through the Covid crisis, which meant they lost a lot of skilled labour. Those agents and engineers who had perhaps spent their entire careers on the ramp were forced to find new jobs in new industries or opted to retire. But many of them never returned.
And though the pandemic bears the blame for much of the industry’s struggle to recruit and retain new staff, it could be considered that cultural and social attitudes have shifted significantly in recent years.
According to Anthony Young, director and co-founder of Optime Group, a UK company that provides recruitment solutions to ground handlers: “The biggest shift we’ve seen post-pandemic is attitudes to work.
“People who had perhaps worked in ground handling for years suddenly had to find new jobs outside the airport environment and thought, ‘What have I been doing this whole time?’”
The opportunity for flexible hours and other comforts that the ramp can’t afford, such as the ability to work from home, simply due to the nature of the work, drove people away from the “crazy shift patterns and undesirable pay”, says Young.
Simon Miles, of Miles Aviation Consultancy, agrees: “Ground handlers have a very high turnover and some places are worse than others. Why? Because they don’t pay enough. That’s what it really comes down to at the end of the day.”
Miles says ground handlers in the UK, for instance, pay similar wages to the retail industry – the major difference being that people can work in a supermarket or clothing shop for half the hassle or responsibility. “Today you have a situation where ramp workers are paid a fairly equivalent hourly rate to working in retail but to perform a harder job,” he explains.
“They’re paid a pretty low rate for the unsociable hours they work and for harder manual labour. On top of that, they’re required to do a lot of mandatory training and take on quite a lot of responsibility, particularly with regard to the safety and compliance elements of the job. In retail, however, there’s probably half the commitment and working hours are a lot better.”
Young also suggests that the work/life balance is more important to people than ever before. The workers who left aviation during Covid, whether or not on their own terms, no longer have the desire to start a shift in the early hours of the morning and would prefer a job that can accommodate hybrid or remote work.
“Attitudes have definitely changed in that sense,” he says. But does the industry itself have to bear some of the blame?
Young hints that operators have taken their workforces for granted: “Some might have the view that, ‘Our staff love being baggage handlers, they’d never want to do anything else,’ when actually on reflection I think salaries are way behind the curve.”
What of cultural shifts though? Two or three decades ago it was the case that people would leave school, decide on a career and stick to it for the rest of their working lives. But today, it has been suggested that young people could make several career jumps to entirely different industries in the 40 or 50 years before they retire.
High turnover is an unrelenting challenge and operators are asking themselves how they can ensure their employees stay for the long-term, instead of only four or five years.
The next generation
Perhaps it could be said that ground handlers have collectively failed on post-Covid retention simply because many of those skilled and experienced workers who left aviation never returned. But what about recruitment? How can players make the airside environment more attractive to young people?
According to Miles: “It’s very difficult to say what the industry can do because what is attractive to me isn’t necessarily going to appeal to others. If someone is thinking about aviation as a career, they need to see opportunities for career progression.
“Ground handlers generally make a good job of this internally. They put out all these videos on social media saying, ‘Look how proud we are of our team,’ and ‘We’re turning aircraft round on time and doing it safely.’
“But if someone joins the industry to load aircraft, can they see beyond that? Will they see career progression?” Possibly not, Miles hints. “Back in the day, people like loaders earned good money, they had a good base rate because they had a strong trade union and there were always opportunities for overtime.
“There were guys who virtually used to live at the airport. They used to do weekend shifts, but then in came the working time directives that took this opportunity away.
“People used to really love it because there was a big sense of camaraderie. These days, however, people’s desire for better pay has had an impact on that.”
Miles says ground handlers today have a “fundamental issue” with attracting new people for three reasons: low pay, inflexible shift patterns and more responsibilities. He joined the industry at 18 as a self-proclaimed aviation geek.
Miles Aviation Consultancy recently completed a ground handling tender at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) where there is an annual staff turnover of around 100%. Recruitment costs are therefore high. But airports in Europe are suffering from similar turnover rates, says Miles.
Miles Aviation Consultancy also provides de-icing training for another customer in the UK. “We had been training the same 20 faces every year for the three years prior to Covid. Post-pandemic, I think all except for one were new people. The rest of them had gone and not come back,” says Miles.
Other issues at play
Though the pandemic takes the blame for many of the industry’s ills today, there are wider issues that have exacerbated the global labour shortage. Matthew Young, brother of Anthony and also a director and co-founder of Optime Group, says politics has played its part too.
In the UK for instance, Young claims Brexit has had a detrimental impact on the industry’s workforce. “We saw a lot of European nationals move back home during the pandemic and not come back when things picked up again due to the uncertainty.
“The perfect storm of Covid and Brexit, as well as a number of other factors like rising living costs, has impacted recruitment and retention. But the landscape has changed a bit, there has been quite a strong recovery and Optime’s belief is that the industry has bounced back and things have changed.”
In Miles’s view though, the airline industry – and low-cost operators in particular – must take some of the responsibility for the shifting dynamics of the market. By nature, he says, low-fare airlines want a low-cost service.
What exactly does that mean? “They want the best service but for a low price, and that removes a lot of the margin that handlers would have. As a result, handlers [have started to] operate on a minimum, so there’s no real scope for them to pay their staff wages over and above the retail industry, if you want to use that as a benchmark.
“Ground handlers want to make more of a margin, but airlines are quite happy to see them making less of a margin because it benefits them. There’s no joined-up thinking, it’s every man for himself.”
He adds: “The airlines don’t care if the ground handlers go out of business. They might say they do, but the reality is they’ll give their business to somebody else – and the other ground handler would be very happy because they’d clean up.
“It’s a really odd, dog-eat-dog world. There doesn’t seem to be a real answer other than the airlines being prepared to pay their supply chain a little bit more. But that would mean they’d have to put up their fares.”
Miles concludes that if, for instance, an airline can save £1,000 per turn by choosing one handler over another, “despite what they say about wanting quality in addition to cutting costs, that’s too much of a saving to ignore”.
