Pilots of the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings have been called on Thursday to go on strike. The union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) justified the industrial action on Tuesday with “failed” negotiations on the collective agreement. Among other things, VC calls for longer rest periods for the pilots. The airline criticized the call for a strike and the demands as “excessive”. However, she assumed that she would be able to handle a “significant part” of the flight offer on Thursday.
According to VC, the strike should begin at midnight on Thursday night and last 24 hours. The reason is that a total of ten rounds of negotiations “did not lead to any significant rapprochement,” the union said. She calls for relief for employees – for example by reducing the maximum flight duty times and increasing the rest periods.
The collective agreement has existed since 2015 “without any adjustments,” explained VC. Since then, the workload has “increased significantly”. “The employer regularly exhausts the working time of the colleagues up to the permissible maximum, this cannot be a permanent situation,” explained VC spokesman Matthias Baier. He accused the Eurowings management of “lack of accommodation” and a lack of willingness to find a solution.
The Eurowings management criticized the demands sharply: “Despite two upcoming salary increases of well over ten percent in the next four months, VC is demanding 14 additional days off a year and a reduction in the maximum weekly working time by five hours,” explained the finance and HR manager Kai Duve. This would “make impossible” 20 percent of Eurowings flights. To go on strike is “completely disproportionate and irresponsible”.
At the same time, the airlines were relaxed about the effects of the strike, “since only Eurowings Germany’s flight operations are on strike, not Eurowings Europe’s”. In addition, Eurowings has “numerous wet lease partners” – leased aircraft including crew – under contract, the company said.
Lufthansa flights are also not affected by the strike. At the beginning of September, a pilots’ strike at the parent company had almost completely paralyzed its flight operations. It was about wage demands of the VC.
Also read:
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– Eurowings: How a one-hour flight became an odyssey through Germany
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