General meeting
Lufthansa boss defends austerity course with new flight companies
The Lufthansa Group has to get its core brand on course. For this purpose, short flights are increasingly shifted to cheaper flight operations – often against the will of the crews.
Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr defended his company’s austerity course against union criticism. At the general meeting of the MDAX group in Frankfurt, he described the foundation of new flight operations outside the regular airline Lufthansa as a “strategic need”.
With their more favorable cost structure, companies such as discover and Edelweiß enabled additional goals to be flashed, said Spohr. With a fleet of around 100 aircraft outside of the Frankfurt and Munich hub, Eurowings is a successful provider of tourist flights. In addition, the new company City Airlines is used for feeder flights to Frankfurt and Munich.
Unions such as the Cockpit Association for the Pilots and UFO for cabin staff criticize the strategy of additional, sometimes non -tariffed flight operations for years. On Monday, the UFO chairman Joachim Vázquez Bürger referred to the competitive situation as the “group-internal extermination competition”.
Pilots demand collective bargaining
The COCKPIT association calls on the company for collective bargaining about the age and transitional supply of the approximately 4,800 pilots at the core company Lufthansa in May. If these fail, new strikes could quickly be due to the deficit stem brand. “However, if the employer does not quickly enter negotiations, the question of suitable reactions will inevitably arise,” said VC spokesman Frank Blanken.
The core brand Lufthansa was the only group company to have a loss last year. According to the Spohr, important reasons are delayed aircraft deliveries and particularly high location and personnel costs in Germany. Lufthansa expects the new federal government to reduce state costs for air safety and air traffic control, said the CEO. “It cannot be in the sense of the new federal government that Lufthansa only grows outside of Germany.”
Material for the general meeting Deutsche Lufthansa AG
dpa
Source: Stern
