After the wage conflict with the ground staff was settled, Lufthansa is now looking for an agreement with the pilots. Their union “Vereinigung Cockpit” has made itself ready to go on strike with a ballot, but is also counting on further negotiations with the group.
“We made four appointments in the next few weeks to see how far apart we are,” said the chairman of the collective bargaining committee, Andreas Pinheiro, in a podcast.
The talks should take place in a confidential setting, as Lufthansa confirmed on Monday. There should be no external reporting. According to reports, strikes are not planned for the duration of the negotiations.
The collective bargaining partners have already gone through six rounds of negotiations, which have so far produced no results. The Lufthansa leadership had recently signaled a willingness to compromise and accepted the VC partial demand for 5.5 percent more money for the rest of 2022. On the other hand, there were no statements on further demands for automatic inflation compensation from 2023 or on changes in the tariff structure.
Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr had promised the pilots a new fleet commitment. This means that a certain number of aircraft from the group fleet would again be reserved solely for the pilots of the core company Lufthansa. The group had canceled the previous commitment for 325 jets at the end of 2021 and also announced that it wanted to shift more traffic to flight operations that work at lower costs. These include “Eurowings Discover” and “Lufthansa Cityline 2”, which is currently being established.
