Summary
- Lufthansa cancels majority of services Feb 20-21 as a result of strike of employees. Passengers left scrambling to rebook flights.
- Staff demand 12.5% pay raise and inflation bonus. Labor dispute ongoing, with previous strikes at German airports.
- Lufthansa offers 10% pay rise rejected by employees. Strike labeled disproportionate by chief human resources director.
Some 100,000 Lufthansa passengers would have received emails on Sunday evening notifying them of a canceled flight. The German flag carrier has moved to cancel nearly all of its services on February 20 and 21 as a result of a strike of Lufthansa employees.
Quite a few Lufthansa divisions affected
As announced by Lufthansa, trade union Verdi has called on ground staff at Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Lufthansa Technik, Lufthansa Cargo and other corporations to go on strike.
Lufthansa noted that the strike would begin on Monday evening (February 19) at 20:00 CET, and end on Wednesday morning (February 21) at 07:10 CET. Verdi’s own announcement specifies that for areas near passengers, strikes would begin on February 20 at 04:00. the trade union noted.
Photo: Joe Kunzler | Easy Flying
Passengers left scrambling to rebook
Lufthansa tells DW that 900 out of 1,000 flights have been canceled as a result of the strikes. Whether it’s getting home or attending to a very important event, the lots of of flight cancelations have prompted passengers to contact Lufthansa en masse to rebook their trips.
On its website, Lufthansa informs customers that they’re able to rebook their flights freed from charge in the event that they have been canceled as a result of the strike. This could be done via
On the time of publication, quite a few customer support phone numbers world wide were unreachable, despite being labeled as 24-hour service lines. The web site’s AI chatbot service was operating fairly slowly as well, although passengers reported with the ability to successfully rebook their flights.
Staff demand higher wages
The employees of the Verdi union are calling for a 12.5% pay raise, in addition to a one-off, group-wide inflation bonus for 25,000 Lufthansa employees. The labor dispute has been ongoing for weeks, with several waves of strikes going down at German airports in January and February.
As highlighted by DW, Lufthansa recently increased its offer to a ten% pay rise. Nevertheless, the offer was rejected by 96% of employees. Representing Verdi as its lead negotiator, Marvin Reschinsky stated:
“The bottom employees feel offended once more. While the [Lufthansa] group gives its pilots with annual basic incomes of as much as 270,000 euros high double-digit pay increases, the bottom employees with starting hourly wages of sometimes 13 euros usually are not even expected to compensate for the value increases of the previous couple of years. That is blatantly anti-social.”
The most recent strike was labeled “disproportionate” by Lufthansa chief human resources director Michael Niggemann, who also highlighted the proven fact that it disrupted each passengers and employees. Niggemann also stated:
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