Airline strike grounds 100 000

LUFTHANSA scrapped 930 more flights yesterday, grounding 100 000 passengers after a court allowed cabin staff to press on with a strike that is shaping up to be the worst in the German airline’s history.

Flight cancellations in and out of Germ biggest airport, Frankfurt, as well as hubs in Munich and Duesseldorf, come after four days of stoppages that had already forced the airline to cancel 2 800 flights, leaving 300 000 passengers stranded.

The industrial action over a dispute with the UFO flight attendants union regarding cost cuts began on Friday with a pause on Sunday, and is set to go on until tomorrow.

Lufthansa had sought to challenge the legality of the industrial action through court injunctions but lost a key bid after the labour court of Darmstadt, which has jurisdiction for Frankfurt and Munich airports, approved the strike.

The court dismissed the airline’s argument that the union’s reasons for striking were “too vague” and unjustified under German labour law.

The UFO union welcomed the ruling, calling for the strike to continue from yesterday until tomorrow across all flights at Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf airports. Lufthansa in a statement said it stood by its position that “the reasons for the strike were not defined clearly enough”.

The setback came after an earlier symbolic victory for the airline dealt by another court which ruled that the strike affecting Duesseldorf airport was illegal – but that judgment was effectively useless as it was limited to Tuesday only and came hours after flights had been cancelled.

The same court was due to issue

later yesterday a ruling for the remaining period of the strike.

The airline has been locked in a battle that erupted nearly two years ago with cabin crew over early retirement provisions which the union wants unchanged.

But Lufthansa argues that the system is too expensive in the face of cut-throat competition from low-cost operators.

Late on Monday the airline presented a new offer to the union but UFO called it unacceptable.

This is the first time that cabin staff have staged walkouts in the long-running dispute, which does not affect Lufthansa’s subsidiaries Germanwings, Eurowings, Lufthansa CityLine, SWISS, Austrian Airlines, Air Dolomiti and Brussels Airlines.— AFP