Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I am once again at Gatwick Airport.

I suppose it's my sort of spiritual home.

As you will know, I was born just about a mile or so away from here.

But I am back surprisingly, or it wasn't on my bingo card actually to talk about the

strikes that are being called for the 28th of July for four days and on the 4th of August for four

days and I want to talk about why they're happening and what the chances are that they might

be called off. So here's the background. Every airline has its own handling company. Sometimes the

airlines will actually do their own handling. So for example, Ryanair at Stansted Airport has their own

offshoot called Ryanair Blue, which does their ground handling here at Gatwick, British Airways

and Whaling actually have a company called GGS, Gatwick Ground Services, which does theirs.

But most of the time it is specialist multinational

handling companies such as for example Swissport and D.H. And they will do the handling. And by

that I mean they will check in passengers. They will handle the bags, they will dispatch the aircraft.

So absolutely essential personnel to any aviation operation.

And if they were not around, then things would unravel very, very quickly.

And, well, today, the Unite Union said that they were calling these strikes among

ground handlers working for four separate companies. So there's actually four different

disputes going on, but at the root of them, it's basically all about pay. There's also concern I understand about sick pay

and the idea that, well, they are getting a raw deal

at a time when the airlines are making large amounts of money.

As you will know, Gatwick, busiest single runway airport in the world.

There's very, very little slack in the system,

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