Frankfurt Lufthansa pilots canceled their two-day strike starting Wednesday. The basis for the agreement is an improved offer from the aviation group, which was submitted on Tuesday morning as requested by the Vereinigung Cockpit union (VC).
The talks took place on Tuesday under enormous time pressure. Lufthansa actually had to decide by 12 p.m. whether to cancel numerous flights because of the walkout. The company announced on Tuesday morning that this was necessary both for aircraft and crew scheduling and for at least a minimal lead time for the affected passengers.
But by midday there was no information for passengers as to whether their flight will take off on Wednesday or Thursday. It was a real economic thriller, it was said in business circles. It was not until the early afternoon that information leaked out that an agreement had been reached.
The Lufthansa management feared that, like a few years ago, a long conflict with ever new waves of strikes threatened. They really wanted to prevent that. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr said on Monday evening at an event at the group headquarters at Frankfurt Airport that they are working on improving the relationship of trust with the collective bargaining partners: “The word partnership must be lived and felt again.”
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Nevertheless, it was unclear until the very end whether a rapprochement could succeed in order to prevent a labor dispute. There are plenty of topics, so only two collective agreements are open. However, the dispute is overshadowed by the pilots’ concern that the Lufthansa core brand will be shrunk at the expense of other group airlines that have lower personnel costs. The Lufthansa leadership is considering relocating feeder flights at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs to a new airline brand, Cityline 2.0.
According to his own statement, Spohr does not want to know anything about a shrinking of the core airline. “In contrast to what is often shown, it has grown more in recent years than the group as a whole,” he said on Monday. The brand strength that Lufthansa has developed is related to the special role of the employees there: “That’s why I believe that better cooperation can also be achieved with this professional group.”
Pilots on a confrontational course
Some pilots also admit behind closed doors that they demanded very high wage supplements. Lufthansa management recently calculated that the union’s original demands would increase personnel costs in the cockpit by a good 40 percent over a period of 18 months, and described this as intolerable.
On the other hand, there are also hardliners in the VC who are looking for a confrontation with the Lufthansa leadership. “We would have liked it differently,” VC collective bargaining board member Marcel Gröls complained before the new talks on Tuesday: “But unfortunately the inertia at Lufthansa is considerable.”
A strike would have had severe consequences. The degree of organization of the pilots is very high, most of them have followed a call from the VC for a labor dispute. It was planned to strike the departures of Lufthansa passenger planes from Germany on Wednesday and Thursday.
>> Read here: Up to 100,000 euros in salary difference – that’s how much pilots earn at Lufthansa and Eurowings
During the first wave of strikes last Friday, Lufthansa canceled the entire program of its core airline. More than 800 flights with 130,000 affected passengers were canceled and the company said it suffered economic damage of 32 million euros. The subsidiaries Eurowings, Lufthansa Cityline and Eurowings Discover were not affected by the industrial action and would have been left out of the new wave. But even at Eurowings, the union has made itself ready to go on strike with a ballot.
The Lufthansa management is aware that there is a backlog in salaries. “In times of such high inflation, significant wage increases are also appropriate from the Management Board’s point of view, especially in the lower income groups,” said Spohr.
Lufthansa has achieved the cost reductions in recent years primarily by maintaining the incomes of long-standing employees, but lowering the starting salaries. “There are starting salaries that are not sustainable in this form with this inflation,” Spohr admitted.
Lufthansa plans to hire thousands of new employees over the next year and a half
In addition, the top Lufthansa seat lured with greater opportunities for advancement. “There have been no promotions in the last two and a half years. Now we’re going to start the whole thing up again.” The company also wants to hire a lot. “We need 20,000 new employees in the next 18 months. That is a tour de force.”
The looming recession in Germany should not change the plans. Spohr also believes that Germany will be hit harder by a recession than other countries. But business in the USA, for example, is going very well. “We sell there at prices and capacity utilization that we do not know in this form. That will continue in 2023.” China will also open up at least a little, Japan has already announced an opening.
In the coming year, according to Spohr, Lufthansa wants to increase capacity from currently around 80 percent of the pre-crisis level to up to 90 percent. That would be 50 more aircraft than in the summer of this year. The core brand would benefit greatly from the investments in the fleet and its equipment, Spohr promised the pilots.
However, the Lufthansa boss makes no secret of the fact that he sees the group as being too dependent on the home market of Germany. “We want to remain among the top ten airlines worldwide, so we want to continue to internationalize.”
Lufthansa welcomes the elimination of the mask requirement on planes
Although one is glad that now only a third of the turnover comes from Germany. But Lufthansa is 80 percent dependent on regulation in Germany, said Spohr, referring to the government’s previous plan to make FFP2 masks compulsory on planes. According to information from the corporate environment, the announcement alone has led to business travelers increasingly relocating long-haul flights to Zurich, where there is no mask requirement.
Spohr is pleased that the federal government moved away from its mask plans on Monday. “How happy are our employees who no longer have to play mask police. How happy almost 300,000 passengers are every day.”
More: “More state influence, less privatization” – Lufthansa laments defeat in the bidding war for ITA.