bosphorus456

Thanks caspritz78 as well!

By the way, in case it is helpful to anyone for now or the future, it looks like my travel insurance TravCan Premier from Inusre Assist (issued in the U.S.) covers strikes for trip cancellation, interruption, or delay. I had to get a more robust policy than usual since someone in my party has a health condition and needs the pre-existing condition waiver. however, the coverage was not exorbitant. I would rather arrive on time, but I am glad to see it will pay if we are delayed for more than a few hours because of a strike.

Thanks,
Elizabeth

FTcadence

200 flights have been canceled: http://atwonline.com/labor/lufthansa...s-pilot-strike

2,200 hotel rooms have been reserved by the airline: http://www.lufthansagroup.com/en/pre...icle/3176.html

500 cots have also been set up.

swested

Boy, sure sucks for a lot of travelers.

pkerr

Well... since they haven't announced a work stoppage for Saturday, can I now relax for my Saturday evening flight? YUL-MUC

JCary

Yes, lucky you!

pkerr

Phew.....!!!!^

f4freeJunior

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; de) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.1033 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

Just glad I booked BA for my flight this week-end. Booked schedule before price or "alliance".

MumbaiDan

I have been thinking the last few days what I would do if being LH Management and face with such a situation. Indeed I would consider to only hire pilots going forward in shell companies somewhere (for example Ireland, which is fully legal and there are no laws against only leasing pilots) and set up new companies as long as I can keep them from the right to be unionised. Why can airlines not keep their pilots outsourced? Unbelievable how a certain minor group of professionals (who have obviously become over privileged) can continue to keep a globally operating company (with such a vast number of employees and customers) hostage. It surprises me that the German Government is not putting the pilots down at some point? And it amuses me that their "low cost" arm Germanwings is also striking. The pilots don't seem to get the entire point of what is going on in their industry.....

mmff

They get it alright, they are just plain selfish and try to maximize their payoff as everyone else. The problem is with the rules of the game, not the players.

Tafflyer

As I see it, Lufthansa Management is being deliberately confrontational. This Dispute was always going to go to a strike, since LH is taking away pilots's fundamental benefits. That has to be done by negotiation and not by simply implementing it.

MumbaiDan

But they don't intend to take anything away from current contract holders. This is only about the new hires. Very much the choice of the new hires whether they are willing to work for the conditions of the new contracts or whether they go for another airline or even another career.

Scoojitsu

Not quite...

Translated:
"For employees hired before 01.01.2014, Lufthansa will keep paying for the early retirements. By that the employer financed early retirement model (not sure how to translate this correctly) will be kept for several decades."

=> sounds good, yes

Translated:
"The individual age of retirement from flight duty shall be raised from 55 years for long term employees to 60 years for employees that have been with the company for less time.
The longer an employee has been with the company, the less he is affected by the increase of the earliest age of retirement.
Very long term employees are not affected by the change at all."

=> So yes, they DO want take something away! Something that employees signed a contract for and that they have paid for over the years.

All for a single grab into the retirement savings vault.
Raising the age of retirement can be put up for discussion. Since everyone tends to work longer. The pilots union is ready to talk about that. But not if LH is using the hammer on them.
It has been calculated that offering early retirement is pretty much self-financing. Since older pilots get paid more, it's just as cheap to send them into retirement (for a max. of 55% after 35 years in the company, less if fewer years) and upgrade a younger pilot that is much lower on the pay scale.
The pilots union also offered to limit the total cost of the early retirements. Wasn't considered by LH.
This is just one puzzle piece of a longer list of disputes. There's alot more up for negotiation. Many of those things unknown to most people who only have the newspaper to retrieve information from.

RTW1

These things are hardly ever as black and white as the media (or employers and unions) represent them to be.

The reality that LH needs to make major changes in payment structures to compete. And that no one likes to take a pay cut, now or in future benefits. No easy answers here, especially when the people running the company seem to be making it worse.

8420PR

If this is all true, the union really need to start communicating this with the public!

To date, they are losing the PR war (and give the impression of having given up). Last April, even some of my very lefty friends wished bad things on the pilots as they looked like triggering a change in the law that would impact other union action.

RTW1

Do you think it would matter?

The average person is either again anything that might inconvenience them (see a lot of those posting here) or when seeing a pilots salary don't care about their compensation being eroded (again see posts here).

Plus these are normally complex matters where a lot of people have no grasp about things involving more than basic pay. There's also not much to gain by having public support, it's still basically a dispute between employer and employees. No one but those two groups can come to an agreement.