by Pavlos Zafiropoulos

Much has been made in the Greek press over Ryanair’s January 14th announcement that it plans to open two new bases in Athens and Thessaloniki airports as part of a 280 million dollar investment in the country. In particular the claim that the company will be creating 2,800 new jobs has been trumpeted as a success by the government and repeated unquestioningly by much of the press.

Such enthusiasm is understandable in a country where the most recent data shows the unemployment rate continuing to tick upwards and now standing at 27.8%. However the ‘2,800 new jobs’ claim does not bear up to scrutiny.

The 2,800 jobs figure comes from Ryanair, but it does not refer to new employment positions created by the company but to ‘on-site’ jobs ‘sustained’ by the airline’s activity. Ryanair refers to research produced by the Airports Council International (ACI), which is the representative body for Europe's largest airport groups. According to the ACI, between 950 and 1000 on site airport jobs are created for every million passengers at an international airport. Given that Ryanair predicts that it will be transporting 1.2 million passengers per year through Athens airport and 1.6 million per year in Thessaloniki, it figures that its activity will ‘sustain’ a total of 2,800 jobs.

Needless to say ‘sustaining’ jobs and ‘creating’ jobs are two different things. Assuming the accuracy of the ACI’s 1000 jobs per million passengers claim, for Ryanair’s move to create 2,800 jobs would mean that all of its passengers are in addition to passengers already moving through the airports. Given that a significant percentage of the passengers expected to fly Ryanair would likely have travelled anyway on one of its competitors, this is highly unlikely.

Indeed data from Athens’s Eleftherios Venizelos airport shows that the number of passengers using the airport has dropped every year since 2007. Although there were some small signs of recovery in the summer months thanks to an increase in international arrivals, overall in 2013 total traffic to the airport dropped by 3.2% compared to the previous year to 12,536,038 passengers. Similar reductions have been seen in Thessaloniki. TPPi contacted Eleftherios Venizelos airport which confirmed that while they expect passenger numbers to grow in 2014, only a minor increase is expected.

Even if the downward trend was suddenly dramatically reversed and passenger traffic grew in line with the European average of 5.5% anticipated for 2014 by the International Civil Aviation Organization, that would still only correspond to an addition of roughly 690 jobs in Athens airport, not the 1,200 claimed by the government. (Traffic would also still be nowhere near the pre-crisis level of 16.5 million passengers in 2007.)

So how many jobs will the low cost carrier actually create? TPPi asked Ryanair how many workers the Dublin based company will be directly employing in Greece but in their written response they declined to answer that question referring only to the ACI research regarding indirect jobs. However according to its website Ryanair, has about 9,000 employees worldwide in 60 bases or roughly 150 per base. As such at most only about 300 (as opposed to almost 3,000) people can reasonably be expected to hired in Greece although, even here, it is far from clear how many will be Greeks.

Not that that has stopped the media reporting that Ryanair will soon be hiring 2,800 people, (link in Greek) which is an awful lot of pilots, stewardesses and ground support crew. The stories may be totally wrong, but this is nothing but good news for Ryanair which is noted for its effective campaigns to get free-publicity.

That Ryanair will soon have bases in Athens and Thessaloniki is of course positive news, at the very least for the passengers willing to trade their comfort for cheaper air tickets. But the arrival of one low cost airline does not an economic miracle make. And by repeating the line that Ryanair is ‘directly creating’ thousands of jobs, the government is showing itself as either incompetent at understanding employment data, or desperate to spin it.

Writing by Pavlos Zafiropoulos, Edited by Dimitris Bounias