Lufthansa and cabin crew agree on higher salaries

Berlin After five months of negotiations, the flight attendants’ union UFO and Lufthansa have reached a wage agreement for the airline’s cabin crew. This provides for more money in two steps for the 19,000 employees in 2023, as both sides announced on Tuesday.

In addition to a base increase of 250 euros for all salary levels on January 1st, the remuneration will increase by 2.5 percent on July 1st. With these two levels, the increases are between almost nine percent and 17.47 percent for career starters, depending on the salary level. The term of the collective agreement ends on December 31, 2023.

“Lower and middle salary brackets benefit disproportionately from the agreement,” said Lufthansa HR Director Michael Niggemann. “With a first solid increase in remuneration after two years of crisis caused by the pandemic, we can now go through 2023, for which an upswing is forecast at Lufthansa,” said Stefan Schwerthelm, board member for collective bargaining from the Independent Flight Attendant Organization (UFO).

The crisis agreement concluded in June 2020 due to the corona pandemic will also be formally terminated with the new remuneration and collective bargaining agreement. “We are glad that the crisis collective agreement is now history,” emphasized Schwerthelm.

At the time, when no one could foresee the end of the pandemic and its consequences for air traffic, it was the right instrument. At least since last week, the current figures and the increased Lufthansa profit forecast have made it clear that the early termination of the crisis collective agreement was the only right step. “Lufthansa saw it that way too,” said the UFO tariff expert.

Lufthansa and UFO had already agreed on five one-off payments for all cabin workers totaling 1,200 euros for August to December 2022.

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