Lufthansa flights grounded
Lufthansa lost a court bid to stop a strike by flight attendants, forcing the airline to cancel 930 flights scheduled for Wednesday.
|||Frankfurt - Deutsche Lufthansa lost a court bid to stop a strike by flight attendants, forcing the airline to cancel 930 flights scheduled for Wednesday and raising the stakes in a labor dispute that has already led to a record string of walkouts by cabin crew.
A German labor court in the Darmstadt ruled early Wednesday that the UFO flight attendants union could move forward with a three-day strike at Lufthansa’s hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. Whether the union can also walk out in Dusseldorf, as it had planned, remains open after the airline asked a second court to extend an injunction through Friday that it issued earlier stopping a previous strike in that city.
Prior to the latest ruling, the airline cancelled Wednesday flights at the three hubs, impacting 100 000 customers, due to the uncertainty of whether they’d be able to operate the connections. The UFO cabin crew union has called for three days of strikes through Friday and said it was considering lengthening the walkout, which began last week.
Labor leaders are battling against Lufthansa’s efforts to restructure to compete with low-cost rivals such as Ryanair Holdings and EasyJet, Europe’s two biggest discount carriers. The airline’s strategy hinges on development of its Eurowings division into a low-cost arm. Lufthansa’s latest offer to UFO included a one-time payment of 3 000 euros ($3 220) per employee and acceptance of the union’s demands on early retirements, but only for current workers, and the carrier said it will scale back flights, a proposal that UFO called a “provocation.”
The Dusseldorf order, which said the union hadn’t adequately specified its demands before calling the strike, can be appealed. While the Dusseldorf ruling only covered a walkout on Tuesday, Lufthansa asked the court to also block the union from continuing the strike in the coming days from that location. The tribunal has scheduled a hearing on the matter for Wednesday afternoon.
The airline had been seeking the injunctions at the two German labor courts to prevent more walkouts after stoppages for four of the past five days, offering to resolve the dispute through arbitration. Lufthansa has already dropped 1 900 flights since the strikes began November 6.
Pilots strike
Lufthansa has declined to estimate how much the flight attendants’ strike has cost. Spending related to 12 800 cancellations over 18 months through September in a parallel dispute with pilots amounted to 352 million euros.
The shares closed down 1 percent at 13.39 euros in Frankfurt. The stock has dropped 3.2 percent this year, valuing the airline at 6.22 billion euros.
Walkouts by pilots ended when a German court ruled in September that the moves marked an illegal effort by the Vereinigung Cockpit union to fight corporate strategy in which labor doesn’t have a say.
Vereinigung Cockpit said separately on Tuesday that it’s filing an appeal at the Constitutional Court, Germany’s top court, over the September ruling. The strike that was halted wasn’t related to any issue outside of early retirement benefits, the union said.
BLOOMBERG