German aircraft group Lufthansa has offered to “drop temporary contracts and staffing by external providers”, a company spokesperson tells Recruiter, ahead of a third day of strikes led by flight attendants union UFO tomorrow (6 October).
The company has also offered a 3.5% pay rise, and is asking the union to “return to the negotiating table in order to find a solution to the current dispute”, in which they seek for better pay and working conditions.
Strikes took place last Friday, 31 August in Frankfurt, and again this week on Tuesday (4 September), in Berlin and Munich as well as Frankfurt. Tomorrow’s strike has led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights, with the company spokesperson adding: “We regret that the union's action results in such inconvenience mainly for our customers and we do our utmost to reduce the effects of it.”
UFO represents around two-thirds of the 19,000 cabin crew at Lufthansa, but the company spokesperson notes that only a “very small number” of Lufthansa-employed flight attendents have temporary contracts, while the number employed by external providers is also “hardly any”.
Specifically, externally-provided are staff working out of Berlin’s Tegel airport, where the company has recently added 10 new aircraft flying continental routes, which tend to only have around three or four flight attendants on any one journey.
- Elsewhere, online news service The Local reports that Berlin’s brand new main airport, Berlin Brandenburg International Airport, which is slated to create 73,000 new direct and indirect jobs, will not open until late October of next year. Having initially planned to open doors in June 2012, this had first been pushed back to March 2013.
