The respite in the ongoing conflict between Lufthansa and its 5,000 or so regular pilots has brought nothing tangible. “We are now back to normal collective bargaining,” the company said, as did the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) union, after confidential talks in the “closed room” ended without a result. This significantly increases the risk of strikes for passengers in the summer, although VC collective bargaining board member Marcel Gröls emphasizes: “I can well imagine that we can get by without strikes.”
There are still almost three months until the peace obligation expires at the end of June. The partners have agreed on dates for negotiations, and there is no standstill in the collective bargaining talks. It is clear, however, that VC will push up its demands that have not yet been publicly communicated, after it has apparently failed to get through with its ideas for the strategic orientation of Europe’s largest aviation group.
Behind tightly closed doors
With the establishment of the closed room, from which nothing actually leaked out, Lufthansa made a lot of concessions to its most important employees in the autumn. Here it was possible to say and discuss relatively freely what a trade union would otherwise quickly interpret as an inadmissible collective agreement target in a public debate. This is how VC felt once before in 2015, when the Hessian State Labor Court stopped a pilots’ strike because of illegal targets. Since then, pilots have been extremely cautious in their public statements.
It remains obvious that the VC wants to retain its sphere of influence at the Lufthansa core company via the group collective agreement (KTV) and ensure good career opportunities for its members. This only works if the scope of the tariff is not further reduced. In the past, VC had secured the number of 325 aircraft in an extra contract that could only be manned by KTV pilots. After Lufthansa terminated this contract in the Corona doldrums, no successor regulation was apparently found in the “closed space”.
Group boss Carsten Spohr is now pushing ahead with the planning for the new “City Airlines” flight operations, which could take over the Lufthansa supply flights to the Frankfurt and Munich hubs in the future. The cake of the VC pilots would be smaller, so that better pay for the co-pilots, who would then have to wait longer and longer to be promoted to captain, is one of the first goals of the VC. The collective bargaining commission has also put numerous details on working hours on the agenda, as explained in a podcast.
Base salaries already increased
The Lufthansa management should have no doubts about the willingness of the VC to go on strike. Before the standstill agreement, which lasted only ten months, the union had paralyzed operations on September 2, 2022, prevented 800 flights and very specifically threatened another, longer round of strikes. To calm things down for the time being, the company had increased the basic salaries of the pilots in two steps by 980 euros, which meant between 5.5 and 20 percent more depending on the income level. The VC had originally requested an automated compensation above the current inflation.
External circumstances have not deteriorated for the pilots since the fall. In the USA, companies are said to pay experienced captains up to $500,000 a year after surviving the corona shock. And Lufthansa is also desperately looking for flying personnel, while the first boomers are retiring. In view of stable demand and good business prospects, training manager Matthias Spohr has only just confirmed that 500 new young pilots will be needed every year in the future, instead of between 150 and 300 so far.
