Lufthansa has signed agreements with its works council and trade unions to introduce short-time working for cabin and ground staff, as well as management, in Frankfurt and Munich, affecting 27,000 of the 35,000-strong staff of the airline.

An agreement with the pilots union “Vereinigung Cockpit” has not yet been reached.

The extent of reduced working hours is determined for employees depending on the loss of work and can be up to 100 percent. For some of the employees, reduced working hours began retrospectively in March 2020.

"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,” said Michael Niggemann, chief officer Corporate Human Resources and Legal Affairs at Deutsche Lufthansa AG.

Based on the current agreements, Lufthansa for the time being is increasing the short-time working allowance up to 90 per cent of the net salary lost through short-time working. How long Deutsche Lufthansa AG can pay these top-up amounts depends largely on the duration of the crisis.

More than 30 companies in the Lufthansa Group, whose employees have German employment contracts, have already or will gradually fall under reduced working hours. These measures also come in effect for airlines in the Lufthansa Group in Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. – TradeArabia News Service