A board displaying cancelled Lufthansa flights can be seen behind the logo of the German airline
yesterday at the airport in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany.
Reuters/AFP
Berlin
Lufthansa has said it will not back down in a row with cabin crews over pensions even after cancelling 930 flights yesterday and 933 today in what is shaping up to be the longest strike in the airline’s history.
Cabin crews started a series of walkouts on Friday in a long-running dispute over early retirement benefits and pensions and have now forced the cancellation of almost 4,000 flights, disrupting the travel of more than 430,000 Lufthansa customers.
Yesterday’s and today’s cancelled flights at Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf airports represent about a third of the total operated by the German airline group each day.
Lufthansa said earlier this week that the strikes were costing it at least €10mn ($10.7mn) a day.
“We have to sit it out in order to safeguard our position,” Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said at a conference in Frankfurt yesterday.
“We put it off for too long,” he said, adding that Lufthansa had made errors in the past by giving in to striking workers.
Lufthansa is negotiating with various staff groups as it tries to reduce costs.
Despite announcing at the end of October that it expected record profits in 2015, Spohr said the airline must cut costs now if it is to deal with increased competition from the likes of Ryanair and easyJet.
The strike is also boosting bookings at Germany’s second largest carrier Air Berlin, it said yesterday.
Lufthansa has resorted to legal action to try to halt the strike, but with little effect so far.
It won a temporary injunction that forced striking crew at Duesseldorf airport to return to work on Tuesday. But its bid to extend the injunction until tomorrow was rejected by the same court yesterday.
A court in Darmstadt, near the airline’s main Frankfurt hub, turned down overnight a bid to halt strikes until tomorrow.
The court has jurisdiction for Frankfurt and Munich airports.
Lufthansa reiterated that it was open to a mediation process with the union, but said it must first halt the strikes.
Arriving at the injunction hearing yesterday, UFO union head Nicoley Baublies again rejected the offer, saying there would be no talks as long as Lufthansa insisted on an end to strikes as a condition for negotiations.
Lufthansa could appeal the Darmstadt court decision, but said it has no plans to do so.
The court dismissed the airline’s argument that the union’s reasons for striking were “too vague” and unjustified under German labour law.
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 to remain unchanged.
The cabin crew walkout is separate from another tussle between management and pilots over the company’s plans to change the early retirement arrangements for pilots.
Lufthansa wants to scrap an arrangement under which pilots can retire at 55 and receive up to 60% of their pay until they reach the statutory retirement age of 65.
The pilots, who are concerned about Lufthansa’s aim to further develop its low-cost activities, have staged repeated walkouts since 2014, costing the airline €350mn ($375mn).
