After the announcement of a warning strike on Wednesday, Lufthansa almost completely shut down its air traffic at the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. More than 1000 flights are canceled. Passengers are already venting their displeasure.
Because of the Verdi warning strike on Wednesday, Lufthansa is canceling almost the entire program at its German hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. The company announced in Frankfurt that there would be flight cancellations this Tuesday as well as on Thursday and Friday. In total, more than 1,000 flights are said to be canceled, with 134,000 passengers affected.
The Verdi trade union has called on around 20,000 ground workers to take part in widespread work stoppages in order to put pressure on the ongoing salary negotiations. Lufthansa HR Director Michael Niggemann criticized the approach: “The early escalation after just two days of negotiations in what has been a constructive round of collective bargaining is causing enormous damage. This affects our passengers in the main travel season in particular. And it puts a strain on our employees in an already difficult phase of air traffic extra strong.”
In addition to the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Hanover, Stuttgart and Cologne are also affected. The Lufthansa Group usually maintains smaller units there, which also offer their services to other airlines. In Bavaria, Friday is the last day of school before the summer holidays. Passengers without transfers should not come to the airports because “little if any” service counters will be open there, the company warned.
Passengers complained online about short-term cancellations of intercontinental flights to the United States or Hong Kong. These are usually the last flights that Lufthansa cancels in the event of a strike. Lufthansa warned transfer passengers against flying to the German hubs without a connecting flight. There is a risk that guests will not be able to travel there for several hours or days.
The all-day strike is scheduled to begin at 3.45 a.m. on Wednesday morning, as Verdi had announced. Very different groups of employees are called upon, such as counter staff, aircraft technicians or the drivers of the huge tow tractors that push aircraft into the correct positions at the airport. Without these services, the jets cannot take off any more than they do without pilots or cabin crew.
The first strike at Lufthansa after the Corona shock comes against the background of a partially chaotic restart in the industry. Personnel bottlenecks and a strong demand for vacations have already led to considerable processing problems this summer without any strikes. Verdi blames mismanagement at airports and airlines for this. The Lufthansa airline boss Jens Ritter, on the other hand, sees the progress made by the strike announcement in question. The walkout will burden customers and staff beyond the day of the strike, said Ritter on the Linkedin platform.
According to its own information, Lufthansa has offered a two-stage flat-rate salary increase of a total of 250 euros for a period of 18 months, which will be accompanied by a profit-related increase of 2 percent from July next year. With a monthly base salary of 3,000 euros, this would result in an increase of 9 to 11 percent, the company calculated. Verdi negotiator Christine Behle described the example as “prettily calculated”.
For other salary ranges, the increase is only around four percent and thus brings real wage losses for the employees, she said “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and “Stuttgarter Nachrichten”. The union demands 9.5 percent more money in the wage tables for a period of 12 months, but at least 350 euros.