Frankfurt The warning strike by Lufthansa ground staff on Wednesday will have massive consequences. The airline is canceling almost its entire flight schedule at the two hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. The company announced this on Tuesday afternoon.
According to Lufthansa, 678 flights have to be canceled in Frankfurt, 32 of them on Tuesday. In Munich there are 646 connections. The company estimates that 92,000 passengers will be affected at these locations alone. In total, more than 1000 flights will be canceled – with 134,000 passengers.
Lufthansa warns that passengers without rebooking should not come to the airports. Few or no service counters are open. Also, transfer passengers who do not have a safe connecting flight should not fly to the German hubs. Otherwise they would run the risk of being stranded there for hours or even days.
We are working flat out to get flight operations back to normal as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, the strikes could still have consequences on Thursday and Friday.
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“The early escalation after just two days of negotiations in what has so far been a constructive round of collective bargaining is causing enormous damage,” said Micheal Niggemann, Lufthansa Board Member for Human Resources. This applies above all to passengers in the main travel season. “And it places an additional heavy burden on our employees in what is already a difficult phase in air traffic.”
Criticism of Verdi – union defends strikes
The labor dispute hits aviation at a particularly busy travel time. After two years of the pandemic, people want to travel again. With the exception of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, there are also summer holidays in all federal states. In Baden-Württemberg they start this weekend. At the same time, there is a lack of staff everywhere, which is why Lufthansa has already had to cancel 6,000 flights.
The Verdi services union called on Lufthansa ground staff at airports such as Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin from 3:45 a.m. Wednesday to 6 a.m. Thursday to stop working. The union wants to increase the pressure on the company management before the next round of negotiations in the coming week and is officially speaking of a “warning strike”.
However, its extent has sparked debate as to whether it is really still a warning strike. Personnel director Niggemann is of the opinion that the labor dispute can hardly be described as such.
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Comments on social media show how much the nerves of the travelers are now on edge. “Carrying out strike measures on the backs of families – that’s completely wrong,” writes Carsten Maschmeyer, entrepreneur and startup investor, on Linkedin. It is undeniable that the situation at the airports is catastrophic due to the lack of skilled workers and that major management mistakes have been made here. “With all understanding for the wage increases: A strike in the middle of the existing holiday chaos – Verdi gambled away any trust and support in the population.”
You can hardly fly from A to B anymore, complains Dirk Kaven, Managing Director at Kaven Consulting, on Linkedin – and sees Lufthansa as a duty: “It’s incredible how unpredictable business trips by plane have become. When I look at the current performance, I seriously ask myself why Lufthansa only lost one star…”
“Typically Verdi. Instead of targeting business traffic, they would rather mess up people’s start to summer vacation, as if it wasn’t annoying enough,” writes Daniel Föst, FDP politician and member of the Bundestag, on Twitter.
There Verdi wedges back: “Thanks go to Lufthansa, which submitted an unfair and inadequate offer. She provoked this strike and is responsible for the failures through her mismanagement.” Verdi had rejected Lufthansa’s offer in mid-July as insufficient. Negotiations are to continue on August 3rd and 4th.
Support for the strike comes from Susanne Ferschl, deputy leader of the Left Party. It is not the warning strike that is unreasonable, but the working conditions and the overload of the employees, she writes on Twitter: “Employees and passengers suffer from the lousy personnel management at Lufthansa, time to change that.”
Effects on other airports still unclear
It is not yet foreseeable what consequences the strike will have on other airlines. This is not how the staff of the so-called Leos will work either. Under the name Lufthansa Engineering and Operational Services, Lufthansa employees at airports such as Düsseldorf take on a large part of the so-called push-backs, pushing the aircraft back from the gate.
Aircraft cannot take off without this service. Details are expected later today.
More: Despite record failures: air traffic controllers see more traffic in the sky than expected