Air France has announced plans to slash more than 4,000 jobs by 2013. The airline claims that the cost cutting measure is necessary after it announced record losses for the 12 months to March. Air France is blaming financial problems caused by the global economic downturn.

An Air France spokeswoman said that currently the carrier was looking to lose 4,109 full-time staff members from ground and administration over the next three years. She added that the airline hoped to be able to do this by not replacing staff due to retire and by relying on voluntary redundancies.

Announcement of the staff reduction plans has caused outrage at the CFDT union which claimed that management at Air France were incapable of producing a strategy for the airline which bore any relation to reality. In a statement, the CFDT added that the announcement that more than 4,000 jobs were about to disappear would do little to buoy the flagging spirits of Air France staff, who are already watching the decline of the conditions they work in.

The union also claimed that managers at the airline had not adequately confronted the troubles being faced by the carrier’s short-haul and medium-haul networks. Air France-KLM employs 103,000 staff. In the year to the end of March, the airline declared a loss of €1.3 billion.

In May, the group announced that it aimed to break even this year, but although IATA has dramatically changed its forecast for the world’s airline industry for the next 12 months from loss to profit, it has warned that Europe’s recovery might continue to lag.