Hundreds of personnel needed to staff border checkpoints at Schiphol: report

The long lines at Schiphol Airport will not be solved just by recruiting more security workers. The Koninklijke Marechaussee, responsible for the border checkpoints, is also short hundreds of workers, an insider told De Telegraaf.

“On a structural basis, it’s about two to three hundred” open vacancies at the Koninklijke Marechaussee, the insider said. The Marechaussee is a policing force that works as part of the Dutch military and is responsible for border security, including at airports.

Solving the staff shortages in airport security at Schiphol will, therefore, only shift the long lines of passengers from the security checkpoints to the passport checkpoints, according to the newspaper’s sources.

The MarVer, the trade union for the Koninklijke Marechaussee, confirmed the staff shortages, though chairman Sven Schuitema could not give the newspaper exact numbers. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice and Security also confirmed that there are staff shortages at the Marechaussee but also wouldn’t give numbers.

Schiphol has been one of the most visible examples of widespread staff shortages in the Netherlands. The airport has been struggling with hours-long queues at security checks since April and has had to ask airlines multiple times to reduce their number of departing passengers.

The Dutch labor market is extremely tight at the moment, with many more vacancies than people looking for work. Though there were signs of the market loosening a bit in the third quarter as vacancies decreased and unemployment rose slightly, Statistics Netherlands reported earlier this week.

At the end of the third quarter, there were 121 vacancies for every 100 unemployed, down from 143 vacancies per 100 unemployed in the second quarter.