Ground staff strike to hit Lufthansa on Tuesday this week

More than 100,000 Lufthansa passengers face delays and disrupted flights this week after German services union Verdi called its ground staff out on a 27-hour strike starting on Tuesday.

Lufthansa said on Sunday that it was working on an emergency schedule. Airports in Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Cologne-Bonn and Stuttgart will be hit.

Ground staff are to walk off the job at 4 am (0300 GMT) on Tuesday and return to work at around dawn on Wednesday, Verdi announced in Berlin.

All ground staff, including maintenance and check-in personnel have been called out, with the result that large-scale cancellations can be expected.

Different times will apply to freight and technical services.

The union is exerting pressure in relation to pay talks for 25,000 workers employed by Lufthansa, Lufthansa Technik, Lufthansa Cargo, Lufthansa Technik Logistik Services, Lufthansa Engineering and Operational Services and other companies in the large Lufthansa group.

According to Lufthansa, 20,000 of its employees are involved.

Lufthansa human resources executive Michael Niggemann said the strike would hit passengers and employees. "This is not the way to meet our joint responsibility to our staff, to our passengers, for a strong and reliable Lufthansa," he said.

He noted that the renewed strike came immediately before the next round of pay talks on Wednesday and that Lufthansa had presented a far-reaching offer.

Verdi noted that agreement had not been reached in the third round of talks, with Lufthansa's offer to ground staff rejected by a majority of its workers.

Low increases for ground staff compared with other employees, the number of months without an increase and the duration of the new contract were all unacceptable, the union said.

Lufthansa was also not prepared to restore pay that had been given up during the coronavirus pandemic.

Verdi lead negotiator Marvin Reschinsky said: "Ground staff feel insulted once more." While Lufthansa was rewarding its pilots with basic pay of up to €270,000 ($290,000), ground staff were starting on €13 per hour. He termed this "crassly unsocial."

Verdi is demanding a 12.5% increase, with at least €500 more per month, and a one-off inflation premium of €3,000.

Lufthansa is offering at least 10% increase in basic pay in 12 months, with a tax-free inflation premium totalling €3,000. Pay for 20,000 ground staff had increased on average by 11.5% over the past 18 months, the company said.

A current separate three-day pilots' strike at Lufthansa subsidiary Discover is to end one minute before midnight on Monday (2259 GMT). The strike by the Cockpit union led to cancellations at the tourism subsidiary at Frankfurt and Munich airports.

Eight of 19 flights scheduled on Sunday were cancelled. Discover said it planned to use aircraft of other airlines or book passengers onto later flights.

Ahead of the strike, which began at midnight on Friday, Discover said it planned to maintain two thirds of its schedule.

On Saturday, Discover said it had cancelled seven of 16 flights.

Cockpit has called for a solidarity strike by Lufthansa pilots for Monday morning. The strike is to last for four hours and affect only aircraft of the type Boeing 787. Lufthansa operates just five of these planes to date.

According to Lufthansa, the short strike could affect four departures, but the airline was confident that the departures would take place as scheduled.

Lufthansa executive Karl Brandes expressed incomprehension at the solidarity strike.

"[We have] the aim of ensuring that we at Lufthansa Airlines have long-term collective bargaining peace without strikes in order to realize our planned growth together with you in the coming years," he noted in a letter to the company's pilots.

Discover, which operates 24 Airbus aircraft and employs around 420 pilots, is a relatively small airline operating from Frankfurt and Munich. It is a competitor mainly to Condor in the tourism market.

The Cockpit union aims to force the first collective agreement at the airline, which was founded in the summer of 2021. The pilots have already organized a five-hour strike and two regular strikes since December.

Discover says it is already paying higher salaries to pilots, but this was agreed with the works council and not the union. The new salaries correspond exactly to the union's demands, both sides have confirmed.

Cockpit is aiming for the security of a fully legal collective agreement.