Lufthansa strike halts 800 flights
GERMAN airline Lufthansa said it had slashed 800 flights yesterday as pilots walked out for a 48-hour strike following a four-day stoppage last week in a longrunning pay dispute.
Around 82,000 passengers were affected yesterday by the latest industrial action, the 15th by the carrier’s flight crew since April 2014.
While yesterday’s walkout affects short-haul flights, today will see a further 890 flights cancelled including some long-haul services.
Lufthansa failed to obtain an injunction to halt the strike from a Munich court – the second time in a week its attempts to block industrial action by legal means have fallen through after a similar judgement in Frankfurt.
A spokesman said the group had withdrawn an appeal against the Bavarian court’s judgement.
There is little sign of an end to the drawn-out dispute between pilots and managers at Lufthansa, with union Vereinigung Cockpit warning of further strikes if the airline does not soften its position.
“Strikes can continue as long as we don’t have an offer we can negotiate over,” union leader Joerg Handwerg told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily.
Pilots complain that they have had no pay rise in five years, while the airline has continued to book healthy profits.
They demand a pay increase of an average of 3.66 percent per year, retroactive for the past five years.
But managers have rejected such a settlement, with their last offer a one-off bonus of just under two months’ salary and a 4.4 percent pay increase spread over two years – a deal refused by Cockpit at the weekend.
The pay deal was “only a part of an overall package” that included cuts to pensions, Handwerg said.
Lufthansa’s 5,400 pilots have been called out on strike roughly 15 times since spring 2014 by Vereinigung Cockpit.
The dispute was sparked by disagreements over managers’ plans to change costly early retirement provisions as they looked for savings in the face of stiff competition from lowcost rivals like Ryanair and Easyjet as well as higher-end competitors from the Gulf.
Cockpit is also concerned about the board’s plans to reform pensions and hire more pilots on lower pay as Lufthansa builds out its own lowcost subsidiary Eurowings.
Lufthansa says it pays pilots significantly more than its competitors.
According to managers, a co-pilot earns a starting salary of 6,500 ($6,890) gross per month, while a late-career captain can be paid as much as 22,000.
Pilots are not the only group to have hit Lufthansa with work stoppages in recent years.
November 2015 saw the group face its longest-ever strike as cabin crew staged a seven-day walkout at the urging of their own union, UFO – forcing the cancellation of more than 4,600 flights.
Lufthansa has managed to strike deals in several labour disputes, notably with cabin crew and ground crew on its flagship airline.
But other battles are still to be fought – as a walkout by some cabin crew at Eurowings showed just last week.
An end to the trial of strength with Cockpit appears distant.
“The damage is already so great that it’s increasingly difficult for the two sides to reach a compromise without losing face,” said Guido Hoymann, an air travel sector analyst at Metzler bank.
Repeated strikes at Lufthansa have caused “longterm” damage to the group’s reputation, Hoymann said.
“Lufthansa’s reliability has been called into question,” he said, adding that the group could lose customers – especially from its sizeable business segment.
In purely financial terms, the impact has so far been smaller.
One strike day costs the group between 10 million and
15 million, Lufthansa says. In 2015, the group lost around
100 million to strikes.