Friday goes to be a really tough day for aviation in Germany…
Verdi commerce union calls strikes at German airports
Verdi is the commerce union representing public sector staff at main airports in Germany. The union is looking on a strike for Friday, February 17, 2023, which is able to final all day, from 12:00AM till 11:59PM. This may impression seven airports in Germany — Frankfurt (FRA), Munich (MUC), Stuttgart (STR), Hamburg (HAM), Dortmund (DTM), Hannover (HAJ), and Bremen (BRE).
For the document, these aren’t employees employed by any particular airline, however reasonably common airport employees for safety, baggage declare, and different airport operations roles.
This strike is coming after a spherical of unsuccessful negotiations. The subsequent spherical of negotiations are anticipated to happen February 22-23, 2023, and it’s potential that we see one other strike if these don’t go effectively.
This strike comes because the union is making an attempt to barter a big wage improve, meant to counter the “catastrophic labor scarcity” that has existed at airports in Germany because the begin of the pandemic.
Lufthansa cancels all Frankfurt & Munich flights
Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline, has introduced that it’ll cancel over 1,300 flights on Friday. Particularly, each Frankfurt and Munich are suspending all passenger operations for Friday, inflicting Lufthansa to cancel all flights at its two largest hubs.
Lufthansa has reached out to passengers impacted by this, and is engaged on rebooking passengers, both through flight or rail. Right here’s how Michael Niggemann, Lufthansa Group’s Chief Officer of Human Sources & Infrastructure, describes this strike:
“We remorse the big impression of this warning strike which is being carried out on the expense of our passengers. We aren’t a celebration to the collective bargaining and haven’t any affect on it – however, our company and we’re massively affected. Greater than 1,300 flight cancellations for Lufthansa Group airways alone present as soon as once more how weak and fragile the air transport system is to strike exercise.”
Suffice it to say that Lufthansa is having a extremely tough week. On Wednesday, Lufthansa Group had an IT outage, after some fiber optics cables from Deutsche Telekom have been broken by an excavator close to the provider’s headquarters in Frankfurt.
Lufthansa’s operation was a complete mess on Wednesday, and now issues can be even worse on Friday. It’s possible going to take a while earlier than the operation can totally recuperate, and passengers might be rebooked.
Backside line
German airport employees are occurring strike on Friday, which is able to result in mass flight cancelations. Lufthansa is canceling over 1,300 flights, together with all flights from its Frankfurt and Munich hubs. Between this and the IT outage earlier within the week, it’s not a very good time to be flying in Germany.
Are any OMAAT readers impacted by this strike in Germany?
