New talks are set to start up this week as Air France is now seeking 1,500 redundancies from its staff. These formal talks are set to start this week with the worker’s council, called the Comite Central d’Entreprise, or the CCE. The airline is hoping that it will be able to reach some kind of voluntary redundancy plan agreement by October 21.

Air France, which actually just announced a net loss of €426 million for the first quarter in July, said that it had already been in talks with the council in recent months over its trading position. In a statement, Air France went on to say that it’s a very difficult economic environment, and they are having to cut capacity by 5 percent.

The carrier went on to say that it was also preparing a reorganization of its medium haul business in terms of both product and network. Air France said that it plans to adapt to the lower activity level by implementing a voluntary redundancy plan. The timetable for this plan would be discussed this week. The plan is suppose to involve around 1,500 jobs.

When announcing its first quarter losses, Air France said that the global economic downturn has caused unprecedentedly low levels, and this has lead to a sharp decline in volumes and unit revenues. The carrier went on to say that its passenger revenue was down by 18.47 percent and that cargo revenue was down by 41.5 percent. Thus, the total group suffered a combined loss of about 20.5 percent in revenue.

The airline did announce a plan to cut about 3,000 jobs from its payroll by the time 2011 came around. Air France said that they wanted to avoid layoffs by not renewing short term contracts and with a recruitment freeze.