Lufthansa ground staff will go out on strike from the early hours of February 20, ver.di has announced. The industrial action is expected to disrupt travel at seven German airports.

Ver.di announces 27-hour-long Lufthansa strike

Around 900 flights in and out of seven German airports have been cancelled after ver.di announced that Lufthansa ground staff would go on strike from 4am on Tuesday morning.

An estimated 10.000 passengers scheduled to travel to and from airports in Berlin, Cologne-Bonn, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart will be impacted by the strike, which is scheduled to last until 7.10am on February 21.

Why are Lufthansa employees going on strike?

As in many other industries in Germany at the moment, ver.di is negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement on behalf of 25.000 Lufthansa employees.

Ver.di is demanding that the airline’s ground staff receive a 12,5 percent pay rise and a one-off bonus to offset inflation. So far, the airline has only offered a 10 percent increase, but the pay rise was rejected by 96 percent of Lufthansa employees who believe that it does not go far enough to match inflated prices.

“While [Lufthansa] is giving its pilots high double-digit pay rises with basic annual salaries of up to 27.000 euros, ground staff have not even been compensated for price increases in recent years, with some hourly wages of 13 euros. That is blatantly anti-social,” ver.di negotiator Marvin Reschinsky wrote in the union’s press release, adding that the organisation “want[s] a speedy result for employees and passengers".

Thumb image credit: Lutsenko_Oleksandr / Shutterstock.com