Report finds air traffic controllers sleeping on job and colluding to inflate earnings at Warsaw airport

An “informal arrangement” among air traffic control officers at Poland’s busiest airport allowed them to sleep during shifts and rearrange scheduled hours to maximise better-paid overtime. Some earned over 1 million zloty (€217,000) a year – more than five times the salary of the prime minister.

The findings are reported by Business Insider Polska. It published a video on Thursday showing an air traffic controller at Warsaw Chopin Airport – which handled almost 19 million passengers in 2019 – bringing up a mattress to sleep on during working hours. On Friday, the outlet published a second video showing a separate similar occurrence.

An insider told Business Insider that threats of strikes, high costs of worker replacement and union pressure made the agency overseeing flight controllers unwilling to take action.

“The case documented in the film was assessed by the employer as reprehensible, with no explanation,” said Paweł Łukaszewicz, spokesman for the Polish Air Navigation Services Agency (PAŻP), which manages air traffic controllers. “This type of pathological behaviour is not and cannot be the norm.”

However, according to an internal source cited by Business Insider, controllers would regularly “arrange among themselves to take rests” at a time when at least two were required on duty, ahead of the introduction of the single-person operation system in March 2020.

The investigation also alleges that workers set their schedules so as to maximise better-paid overtime. A source told Business Insider that there was an “informal arrangement” at Warsaw’s main airport, by which “people lined up their schedules to suit themselves, covered for each other”.

According to Łukaszewicz, the average earnings of controllers in 2020 were 414,903 zloty. He also noted that the earnings of seven employees exceeded 1 million zloty, with the highest being 1.29 million zloty

Every attempt by managers to deal with the situation was met with “threats of a strike and paralysis of the Warsaw airport”, which “would mean an international scandal”. Moreover, with the cost of training up an air traffic controller estimated at around €250,000, management was unwilling to fire workers.

A report by the Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation (CANSO) – an international body – in 2015 found that air traffic controllers in Poland worked the fewest hours (30 a week) among 21 countries studied but earned by far the most in comparison to national average salaries.

An air traffic control officer (ATCO) in Poland earned around 14 times the national average. Among all countries studied, ATCOs earned on average only three times more than the respective national mean.

The Polish Air Traffic Controllers Trade Union (ZZKRL) told Business Insider that the CANSO report was “created solely on the basis of questionnaires” as an “internal” document and thus was “not completely reliable and unbiased”.

The union’s spokesman also said that reports of controllers earning over a million zloty “are unfortunately not true – we’d like to earn that much”.

Main image credit: Kuba Bożanowski/Flickr (under CC BY 2.0)

Maria Wilczek

Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.