The collective bargaining dispute for Lufthansa ground staff has been resolved. After successful arbitration, Lufthansa and the Verdi union have agreed on the basic principles of a collective agreement for around 25,000 employees, as they announced on Wednesday evening in Frankfurt. This means that the threat of strikes by this group of employees over the Easter holidays has been averted.
“We are very satisfied with the outcome of the arbitration,” said Verdi negotiator Marvin Reschinsky. Michael Niggemann, Lufthansa’s human resources director, said they were also very satisfied. “But there are major investments ahead of us.” However, the agreed salary increases resulted in additional costs. Details should be available on Thursday.
Both sides had been negotiating behind closed doors since Monday under the moderator of the mediators – Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Die Linke) and the former head of the Federal Employment Agency, Frank-Jürgen Weise. The aim was to avoid indefinite strikes over the Easter holidays. If the arbitration failed, Verdi had threatened the ground staff with an indefinite strike.
The union had demanded 12.5 percent more money for a term of one year for the approximately 25,000 Lufthansa ground services employees, while the company had offered 10 percent for a term of 28 months. Verdi has already organized five rounds of warning strikes among ground staff, as a result of which hundreds of flights have been canceled.
However, there are several other tariff conflicts in air transport. Arbitration was recently agreed in the collective bargaining dispute for employees of private aviation security service providers at German airports. It is scheduled to begin on Friday, April 5th, under the leadership of the former Bremen Finance State Councilor Hans-Henning Lühr (SPD). Lufthansa’s flight attendants have also already gone on strike for higher salaries, with no solution yet apparent. In addition, pilots and cabin crew from the Lufthansa subsidiary Discover are demanding an initial tariff rating for the young airline.
