Airlines Lufthansa sends 87,000 employees into short time work

Germany´s largest carrier Lufthansa has announced it will send around 87,000 employees into short time work during the Coronavirus crisis.

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Lufthansa has signed agreements with the work councils and trade unions in order to introduce short time working for ground staff and cabin crew based in Frankfurt and Munich. A final agreement with the pilots union “Vereinigung Cockpit” however has not been reached yet.

During the Coronavirus crisis, Lufthansa is not needing the full workforce from all of its employees, as the demand for flights and trips has been decreased significantly. Employees from the Lufthansa Group can expect the loss of work to be up to 100 percent.

In March 2020, the group started introducing short time working for 27,00 employees of the Deutsche Lufthansa AG. Now, 9,500 staff from Swiss and 7,000 from Austrian Airlines will go into short time working, too.

Michael Niggemann, Chief Officer Corporate Human Resources and Legal Affairs at Deutsche Lufthansa AG commented: "With short-time working, we want to secure jobs of our employees in these difficult and unusual times. Our goal remains trying to avoid redundancies. The agreement of short-time work is an essential prerequisite for this. We will have to constantly review the economic parameters.”

Lufthansa said that the airline for the time being is increasing the short time working allowance up to 90 per cent of the net salary loss through short time working. The group also stated that it can not exactly tell how long the AG can pay these top-up amounts. This depends on the very dynamic development of COVID-19´s spread.

"In solidarity with all employee groups, the Lufthansa Supervisory Board, Executive Board and Management will also participate in the measures. The members of the Supervisory Board have voluntarily waived 25 percent of their compensation, the members of the Executive Board have waived 20 percent and managers not affected by short-time working have waived between 10 and 15 percent of their monthly basic compensation," Lufthansa stated.

Lufthansa is Germany´s largest carrier and the ground consists of Air Dolomiti, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Edelweiss Air, Eurowings, Eurowings Europe, Germanwings, Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cargo, Lufthansa CityLine and Swiss International Air Lines. Together, the group operates 757 aircraft and is one of the largest airlines group in the world.

Source © Lufthansa.com

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