More than 40% of Lufthansa's staff will get hammered as the count swells to 60,000, with addition of 10000 redundancies in 2021.
A loss of €1 billion in the first quarter of 2021 has prompted Lufthansa to announce a further job cut of 10,000.
A strong 138,000 employees were maintaining the airline in the year 2019, pandemic saw announcement of 30,000 initial redundancies, that was increased to 50,000 last year. According to Lufthansa, 24,000 full-time jobs have been eliminated over the past 12 months.
Lufthansa’s finance director, Remco Steenbergen, has threatened to impose compulsory redundancies.
“We’re preparing for layoffs,” he warned at the quarterly update. The intention is to cut 10,000 full-time jobs “or make comparable savings in staffing costs.”
This will serve as the pretext for the trade unions to enforce further wage cuts, allegedly with the aim of saving jobs.
Lufthansa CEO Karsten Spohr complained that Lufthansa and the Cockpit Association are finding difficulty to come to a solution. He expects the job cuts are to be made permanent.
A Lufthansa calculation says, it had a surplus of 1,000 pilots and co-pilots, which is about 20% of all cockpit staffs. Company wants pilots to work part time , taking a 20% wage cut to avoid redundancies.
“Ultimately, five pilots will then do the job of four, everyone flies 80 percent and nobody has to leave,” stated Spohr.
VC (Verdi, the Cockpit Association) has the nod for such part-time flying for the 5,000 pilots at Lufthansa, Lufthansa Cargo and other subsidiaries.
Wage Concessions !
The trade unions Verdi, the Cockpit Association (VC), and Independent Flight Attendants Organisation (UFO), has already offered wage concessions to Lufthansa that amounted to a total of €1.3 billion.
VC agreed to cut pilots’ wages by up to 50 per cent that helped Lufthansa save some €600 million. The UFO also agreed for cost cutting measures for the airline by half a billion euros by the end of 2023.
Then in November 2020, VC gave up employees’ holiday and Christmas pay, as well as accepting a wage freeze and the suspension of all benefits until the end of 2021.
The airline is now reporting that operating profits declined to €4 billion, compared to €8.2 billion during the same period a year earlier. Therefore, despite a 60 percent loss of revenue compared to the same period last year, from €6.4 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to €2.6 billion this year, the losses were halved, from €2.1 billion to €1 billion.
The current loss of €1 billion is to be squeezed out of the remaining workforce. The company is currently negotiating with the VC and Verdi unions on further cuts for 2022.
While all passenger carriers have recorded losses, Lufthansa’s freight business made record profits. This is not only because passenger aircraft are serving as freight carriers, due to the increased demand for freight and a limited supply of providers, prices are currently high.
Lufthansa Cargo earned an operating profit of €314 million. Despite this, Lufthansa announced two months ago that it will lay off close to half of its freight pilots.
