German airline Lufthansa threatens to sue union as strike looms

Feb 18, 2010, 17:08 GMT

Frankfurt - Lufthansa threatened Thursday to sue a pilots' union, Cockpit, if it goes ahead with a four-day strike next week that is expected to shut down most of the German airline's operations.

Christoph Franz, deputy chief executive, said Lufthansa believed a strike for higher pay was illegal because it was out of proportion for one group with an alleged grievance to knock out the operations of a company with a workforce of 110,000.

He said the company legal department was checking if the union could be sued for damages afterwards.

A four-day all-out strike from Monday to Thursday would cause losses to the airline of 100 million euros (135 million dollars).

'It gets to be huge amount of money very quickly,' said Franz.

Chief human-resources officer Stefan Lauer said as far as he knew it was the first time in the history of European civil aviation that pilots had planned such a long strike. He said the company no longer believed it could avert the strike through negotiations.

Franz said the company felt the strike was unfair, because only 350 pilots refusing to fly could shut down the whole airline.

He explained that the union was acting on behalf of 4,500 pilots, of whom an average of 700 were on duty on any one day, with a pilot and co-pilot in each cockpit. That meant the union only needed to order 350 persons not to fly to achieve a lockdown of the fleet.

German unions generally pay their strikers out of strike funds.

He said Lufthansa was refusing to accept demands from the union that would give it power to decide where and when planes were deployed. The union opposes the airline outsourcing work to lower-pay subsidiaries such as its Italian unit.

The media have accused the Lufthansa pilots of greed.

The German Tourist Industry Federation, a group in which Lufthansa is a member, said, 'These pilots receive salaries and perks that practically no other profession in Germany obtains. It's a joke.'

Earlier Thursday, ground staff of the British-owned budget airline Easyjet staged a brief strike at Berlin's Schoenefeld Airport, disrupting operations for five hours and forcing the cancellation of seven departures and seven return flights.