Bird Strike: Backlash Stirs Against Lufthansa Pilots

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/pilots-and-management-battle-over-future-of-lufthansa-a-963395.html



Last week's three-day strike at Lufthansa drew attention to structural problems at a company that is critical to Germany's globalized economy. The flag carrier is losing ground against competitors but its pilots are remaining firm.

Bird Strike: Backlash Stirs Against Lufthansa Pilots
By Dinah Deckstein
April 11, 2014 – 11:07 AM



Munich's Franz Josef Strauss Airport is one of the world's top airports, and ironically, this is most evident on a day when it feels abandoned. On Wednesday of last week, a contemplative silence prevailed in Terminal 2, which is reserved for Lufthansa, its subsidiaries and its partner airlines.

Because the enormous terminal was uncharacteristically empty in the morning, the handful of people in the building had an unobstructed view of the open space and the glass roof, with its awnings and elegant steel ribs. And above it all: a perfect, pale blue sky.

The men and women responsible for the unusual stillness were sitting only a few hundred meters away, in a room adjacent to the airport brewpub: Lufthansa's pilots, who, by staging the first three-day, nonstop strike the company had ever experienced, ensured that about 3,800 flights were cancelled and more than 400,000 passengers were unable to complete their travel plans. It was an impressive show of strength by a small but confident professional group, represented by the tiny German pilots' union, Vereinigung Cockpit (VC).

A Plan Backfires

VC's slogan for the strike, "Stop the profit greed," was illustrated with signs depicting a crane (the Lufthansa symbol) in the clutches of unscrupulous financial investors. But the motto ended up backfiring on the pilots' union. In the public and the press, on television and in many Internet forums, discussions of the pilots' strike, instead of triggering debates over greedy fund managers, were focused on the pilots themselves. People across Germany were talking about whether the strike was justified or excessive. The Lufthansa pilots came under fire, given that their annual salaries can range up to €260,000 ($360,000). The tabloid newspaper Bild characterized the pilots as "luxury strikers" and noted that the highest-paid pilots, "with salaries of up to €21,000 a month, earn 10 times as much as bus drivers" -- the implication being that this is clearly too much.