Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr is threatening to fire around 1,000 pilots due to a disagreement over savings with a pilots’ union.
Spohr wants to reach an agreement on cutting salaries and reducing working hours for pilots.
“If no agreement is reached, this could lead for the first time in the company’s history to the loss of 500 captains and 500 co-pilots in the second quarter,” he told German magazine Wirtschaftswoche.
That would be one fifth of the approximately 5,000 pilots working for Lufthansa, according to Der Spiegel.
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Lufthansa, like other airlines, has been struggling as the coronavirus pandemic severely impacted the aviation industry. It applied for and received state aid from the German state, and its subsidiary Brussels Airlines received state aid from the Belgian state after nearly three months of negotiations.
Nevertheless, Spohr said that bookings had tripled for the summer of 2021 and that he expects business to return to half the levels of 2019 next year, RTE reports.
Jason Spinks
The Brussels Times
