270 flights affected
Strike started at Lufthansa subsidiary Discover
27.08.2024, 05:30 a.m.
Listen to article
This audio version was artificially generated. More info | Send feedback
Starting today, the crews of the Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines are going on strike. The strike is set to last until Friday – all departures from Germany are affected. Passengers must therefore prepare for flight cancellations and delays.
At the end of the holiday season, pilots and cabin crew at the Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines have started to go on strike. This means that passengers will have to deal with delays and flight cancellations, the extent of which is not yet clear. The unions Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) and Ufo have called on the airline’s crews to go on a four-day strike that is due to last until Friday. All departures from Germany are affected, the first of which were planned for early in the morning. A Ufo spokesman confirmed the start of the strike last night.
Discover Airlines announced that it is working to keep the impact on passengers as low as possible and to offer as many flights as possible. Passengers should regularly check their flight status and enter contact details in their booking. Around 270 Discover flights on short, medium and long-haul routes from Frankfurt and Munich are planned during the four-day strike window, it said. The company did not initially give a figure for the expected flight cancellations. The Ufo union expects that Lufthansa will mitigate the impact of the strike by redistributing flights to other group companies.
The holiday airline Discover Airlines, founded in 2021, has 27 aircraft with which it flies to holiday destinations in Europe and overseas. Around 1,900 people work on board. The background to the industrial action is a conflict with the Verdi union, which concluded the first collective agreements for Discover pilots and flight attendants at the still young airline. In addition to regular wage increases for both professional groups of between 16 and 38 percent until the end of 2027, the Verdi contract contains provisions for allowances and working hours, company pension schemes and assistance in the event of loss of a pilot’s license.
The demands of Ufo and VC differ little from the agreement with Verdi, but the sector unions want to implement their own collective agreements. They believe that Verdi does not have enough members in flight operations and was appointed as a collective bargaining partner by Lufthansa management. For the unions VC and Ufo, it is also about influence in the parent company Lufthansa, in which they are firmly rooted in collective bargaining. The VC pilots have already gone on strike in several rounds in the winter. Ufo also called on its members to stop work in order to force negotiations.