Airbus SE employees at a major manufacturing site in Spain have gone on strike in protest of what they say are deteriorating work conditions over the past years. 

The strike, organized by the Independent Union of Aviation Professionals, SIPA, began on July 1 and is scheduled to continue until the end of the month. About 3,000 employees are participating in the industrial action out of a workforce of roughly 9,000 at the Getafe plant, south of Madrid, according to employees at the demonstration. 

Airbus is a major employer in Spain, with more than 14,000 workers across eight sites, including the base in Getafe. Workers at the facility assemble Eurofighter jets, produce satellites and build parts that go into commercial aircraft like the bestselling A320 and the larger A350. 

On July 9, hundreds of protesters, most of them engineers, said their main grievances are salaries that have not kept pace with inflation, cuts to remote-working arrangements and the company’s decision to impose vacation periods without negotiating them with employees and managers. 

Airbus did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The protesters said Airbus had not communicated directly with them since the start of the strike, but were told that the planemaker would negotiate with SIPA. 

In June, the European planemaker asked staff to start coming into the office more, pulling back on the allotted work-from-home days that employees had been granted since the pandemic. 

Work-from-home arrangements have been a contentious issue for many industrial companies because their workforces tend to be split between manufacturing employees that need to be on site and those that can perform their office jobs from home. 

Airbus has a global staff of about 160,000 people, with major sites in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg in northern Germany, along with assembly lines in the US and China.

More than 3,000 Airbus engineers and aircraft fitters had planned to go on strike in the U.K. last year over pay scale until the planemaker made an offer with improved salaries and a one-time payment. 

Employees at Getafe said the walkout is delaying projects at the facility because aircraft inspections, engineering checks, and other work required to complete deliveries cannot be carried out as usual.