Turkish Airlines Kenya Workers Threaten Strike as Management Turns Deaf Ears on Grievances

The ink had barely dried on a back-to-work deal between Kenya’s aviation authorities and striking air traffic controllers when a second bombshell exploded across the tarmac at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

The Transport Workers Union of Kenya (TAWU), acting with the full backing of the Central Organisation of Trade Unions and the London-based International Transport Workers Federation, issued a formal 21-day strike notice to Turkish Airlines on February 13, 2026, accusing one of the world’s largest carriers by passenger volume of wilfully refusing to conclude a Collective Bargaining Agreement it has spent years pretending to negotiate.

The timing is devastating for Kenya’s aviation reputation.

Just seventy-two hours earlier, scenes of chaos gripped JKIA as the Kenya Aviation Workers Union (KAWU) pulled its members off the job at 6am on Monday, February 16, shutting down air traffic control at the nation’s busiest airport and triggering a domino collapse that no contingency plan could adequately contain.

Passengers sat on stationary aircraft for hours awaiting clearance for take-off. National Assembly Deputy Speaker Gladys Boss arrived at the airport only to find her morning flight cancelled.

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association issued an extraordinary safety warning, cautioning that crew fatigue resulting from cascading delays was pushing the industry toward a crisis that went far beyond industrial relations.

A CBA Dispute Born Before Some Airport Workers Were Adults

The grievances fuelling the TAWU notice against Turkish Airlines are not new. TAWU General Secretary Nicholas Otieno Ogola signed a notice accusing the Istanbul-headquartered carrier of a “continued refusal to conclude the Collective Bargaining Agreement and persistent failure to negotiate in good faith, notwithstanding prolonged negotiations.”

The dispute has already found its way before the courts, where a judge expressly urged both parties to engage constructively. The airline, according to the union, responded to that judicial nudge with studied indifference.

Turkish Airlines operates two daily departures between JKIA and Istanbul, offering 445 seats per day.

The Nairobi route is not a peripheral operation for the carrier; it is a critical artery serving Kenyan passengers connecting to Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East.

A strike by its thirteen unionised Kenyan staff would be a localised but deeply symbolic rupture, one that could complicate the airline’s standing in an East African market it has worked hard to expand since it reopened its Mombasa route after a five-year hiatus just last year. Tellingly, a Turkish Airlines official told Business Daily Africa that only 48 of the CBA’s approximately 50 clauses had been concluded and that negotiations were continuing, a characterisation the union flatly rejects.

Two Days That Cost Kenya’s Economy Hundreds of Millions

The KAWU strike that immediately preceded the TAWU notice provides the starkest possible illustration of what happens when aviation labour disputes are allowed to fester unresolved for more than a decade.

KAWU’s last Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority expired in 2015.

Eleven years passed without a salary review, without revised allowances, without updated terms of service, while KCAA management, according to the union’s secretary general Moss Ndiema, continued to enjoy improved remuneration. When KAWU finally issued its seven-day notice on February 8, courts attempted to intervene: Lady Justice Agnes Nzei issued temporary orders suspending the strike on Friday, February 13. The workers went out anyway.

The economic consequences were swift and brutal. The Fresh Produce Association of Kenya, whose members export cut flowers, fruits and vegetables through JKIA cargo terminals, calculated losses of Sh410 million for every single day that aviation workers stayed away.

The Kenya Association of Travel Agents estimated Sh2 million in lost ticket sales per day.

Live tracking data showed multiple flights delayed by more than two hours as of midday on February 16 alone, with Kenya Airways, Jambojet, Ethiopian Airlines, Uganda Airlines, RwandAir, Etihad Airways and Air Arabia all caught in the paralysis.

The strike was not an isolated grievance. KAWU’s Ndiema enumerated abuses that had accumulated over the better part of fifteen years: workers employed on rolling three-month and six-month contracts to fill permanently required positions, in direct contravention of court rulings that have repeatedly pronounced such arrangements unlawful; female contract employees denied medical cover for their newborn children; workers blocked from exercising their constitutional right to union membership; and a unilateral organisational restructuring by KCAA management that the union says was implemented without consultation and degrades established aviation structures.

A court order to renew the contract of Flight Operations Inspector Vivian Ongwae, issued by the Employment and Labour Relations Court in September 2025, was defied by KCAA management outright.

A Pattern of Institutional Contempt for Labour Rights

What makes both the KAWU and the TAWU disputes so damning is that they are part of a pattern rather than an aberration. In September 2025, workers at the Kenya Airports Authority threatened to strike over identically configured grievances: stalled CBAs and the systematic misuse of contract employment. Dialogue averted that walkout. Earlier that same year, in January 2026, KAWU convened a press conference at JKIA warning of a full shutdown of Kenyan airspace within seven days unless KCAA returned to the negotiating table with what the union called a realistic proposal. That ultimatum too was deflected, but not resolved, and the underlying conditions that produced it remained entirely untouched, which is precisely why the February 16 strike became inevitable.

The pattern is not unique to Kenya. Across Europe, aviation labour disputes have become the defining operational risk of the post-pandemic era. In Germany, a 24-hour walkout by airport security workers and ground staff in March 2025 affected thirteen major airports including Frankfurt and Munich, cancelling more than 3,400 flights and stranding some 560,000 passengers. In France, air traffic control strikes occurred on 34 of 39 days between March and April 2024, disrupting more than 237,000 flights. Turkish Airlines itself has not been immune: German ground workers’ industrial action in March 2025 forced the carrier to cancel several Germany-bound routes, a precedent that will not be lost on TAWU’s strategists as they calculate the pressure points of the current dispute.

What distinguishes the Kenyan situation from its European counterparts is the sheer duration of institutional neglect. French and German workers typically strike over disputes that are months, occasionally a few years, in the making. KAWU’s workers went without a salary review for eleven years. TAWU’s members at Turkish Airlines have watched a CBA stall through court proceedings, judicial exhortations to negotiate in good faith, and prolonged talks that concluded 48 of the agreement’s 50 clauses while leaving the remaining two as perpetual hostages. In Kenya, institutional contempt for the CBA framework has become so normalised that workers have come to regard strikes not as a weapon of last resort but as the only negotiating tool that management is reliably capable of understanding.

The Safety Dimension That No One Can Afford to Ignore

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) injected a consideration into the February crisis that cuts through the sterile language of collective bargaining and reaches into the cockpit itself. In a statement on February 17, KALPA Secretary-General Captain Muriithi Nyagah warned that cascading delays were disrupting crew scheduling and mandatory rest periods with potentially catastrophic consequences for flight safety. “Aviation safety is non-negotiable,” KALPA said, invoking Flight Duty Period limitations that exist not as bureaucratic formality but as hard-won protections against the kind of fatigue that turns aircraft into projectiles. When the institutional failures of labour relations management reach the point at which pilots must issue public safety warnings about their own capacity to operate safely, the situation has ceased to be a dispute over salary scales and has become a matter of national aviation security.

The KAWU strike ended on February 18, after forty-eight hours of disruption had already inflicted its economic toll, when the union agreed to return to work following emergency negotiations involving the Ministry of Roads and Transport, the Ministry of Labour, the Kenya Airports Authority and KAWU itself. Transport Cabinet Secretary Davies Chirchir declared that aviation contributes immensely to Kenya’s economy and committed to sector stability. Operations at JKIA and other Kenyan airports resumed immediately under a return-to-work formula that committed to reviewing KCAA staff grades previously proposed and agreed upon but never implemented. Kenya Airways announced it expected to normalise its schedules within twenty-four hours, though aviation analysts noted that aircraft out of position, crews in violation of rest requirements, and backlogged baggage operations would continue to create ripple effects for days.

What Turkish Airlines Must Decide Before March 6

The twenty-one-day clock on the TAWU notice to Turkish Airlines now ticks toward early March 2026 with a backdrop that could not be more charged. TAWU has made its position unambiguous: unless the airline concludes the CBA within the notice period, it will proceed with a “lawful and protected strike” without further warning. The union says it remains ready to conclude the agreement within the notice window if Turkish Airlines engages meaningfully, a formulation that implies the carrier needs only to demonstrate the kind of serious negotiating intent the court has already explicitly required of it.

For Turkish Airlines, the calculation is straightforward to state and apparently difficult to act upon. The carrier has expanded aggressively across Africa and positioned Nairobi as a jewel in that continental strategy, resuming Mombasa service as recently as 2025 after a five-year absence. A strike by its Kenyan workers, even a numerically small contingent of thirteen unionised staff, would land at a moment of maximum reputational vulnerability for Kenyan aviation as a whole, threatening to crystallise in the minds of international passengers a perception that the country’s airports cannot be relied upon for operational consistency.

The deeper question, however, is not what Turkish Airlines decides to do about two unconcluded CBA clauses in the next three weeks. It is whether Kenya’s aviation sector, its regulators, its airport authorities, its flag carrier, and the foreign airlines that have made JKIA their East African gateway, have absorbed the lesson that the KAWU strike so violently drove home: that labour agreements deferred are not labour agreements avoided, and that the cost of a strike that paralyses Sh410 million of daily fresh produce exports, delays six-hour queues of international passengers, generates safety advisories from pilots’ associations, and forces Cabinet Secretaries into emergency press conferences, will always be immeasurably greater than the cost of honouring the agreements that workers were promised in the first place.