Industry Norwegian forced to furlough an additional 1,600 employees

Following the decision of the Norwegian government to not support Norwegian financially, the carrier now had to make the decision to furlough an additional 1,600 employees. Due to newly imposed travel restrictions, the airline is not able to perform flights as planned and has to reduce costs.

In addition to the forced redundancies, Norwegian will also need to ground 15 of the 21 aircraft that have been operated by the Low-Cost carrier in the past months.

CEO Jacob Schram of Norwegian commented: "This is a sad day for everyone at Norwegian and I sincerely apologise to all our colleagues that are now affected, but there is no other alternative. Prior to Covid-19, Norwegian employed more than 10,000 people, but the coming months there will be only 600 colleagues employed. Our goal is to keep six aircraft on domestic routes in Norway, and I expect that Norwegian will also receive route support from the Ministry of Transportation, as previously announced."

The domestic routes will be between Oslo and Alta, Bergen, Bodø, Evenes, Haugesund, Kirkenes, Molde, Stavanger, Tromsø, Trondheim and Ålesund. Furthermore, Norwegian will operate the Tromsø – Longyearbyen route.

Yesterday, Norwegian released a statement, in which it stated that the airline was very disappointed about the lack of government support. Over the past years and even before the Coronavirus-pandemic, Norwegian struggled with its finances and had to implement a strict restructuring plan.

In the statement, Norwegian said that it will do everything in their power to get through this crisis, even though the company is facing a very uncertain future.

Yesterday, Schram said: "The fact that our government has decided to refrain from providing Norwegian with further financial support is very disappointing and feels like a slap in the face for everybody at Norwegian who is fighting for the company when our competitors are receiving billions in funding from their respective governments."