With the ground staff’s warning strike, Lufthansa’s flight operations have been largely paralyzed. Verdi wants to talk to the airline before further strikes. The advises those affected without a rebooking offer from coming to the airports.
In the middle of the holidays, Lufthansa passengers are hit hard by the Verdi warning strike. The airline has canceled almost its entire flight schedule because the union has called on ground staff to stop working from Wednesday to Thursday. According to the company, 678 flights in Frankfurt and 345 flights in Munich remain on the ground. In the middle of the holiday season, more than 130,000 passengers are affected, and by no means all of them could be rebooked because the planes are already full in the following days. According to Lufthansa, at least 47 connections were canceled on Tuesday, which affected the travel plans of almost 7,500 passengers. The airline fears effects until Friday, the last day of school before the summer holidays in Bavaria.
Lufthansa strongly advised passengers who did not receive a rebooking offer not to come to the airports. Because of the strike, “only a few or no” service counters were open there. Transfer passengers without a connecting flight should not fly to the German hubs. There is a risk that guests will not be able to travel there for several hours or days. Despite this, there were long queues at the counters in the morning.
Travelers are queuing in front of the check-in counters at Düsseldorf Airport.
(Photo: Roberto Pfeil/dpa)
According to Verdi, various Lufthansa companies at the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich as well as in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Hanover, Stuttgart and Cologne will be on strike from 3.45 a.m. on Wednesday. Very different groups of employees are called upon, such as counter staff, aircraft technicians or the drivers of the huge tow tractors that push aircraft into the correct positions at the airport. Without these services, the jets cannot take off any more than they do without pilots or cabin crew.
The first strike at Lufthansa after the Corona shock comes against the background of a partially chaotic restart in the industry. Personnel bottlenecks and a strong demand for vacations have already led to considerable handling problems this summer without any strikes. Verdi blames mismanagement and excessive staff cuts at airports and airlines for this. The Lufthansa airline boss Jens Ritter, on the other hand, sees the progress made in the past few weeks with the strike in question. The walkout will burden customers and staff beyond the day of the strike, he wrote on the Linkedin platform. Lufthansa and Verdi only discussed the future salaries and working conditions of the around 20,000 ground workers in two rounds. A third date is already for the 3./4. Agreed in Frankfurt in August.
Verdi negotiator Christine Behle assured on Wednesday in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin” that Lufthansa customers do not have to prepare for further actions after the warning strike until the next round of negotiations. “I can rule that out,” she said.