Deutsche Lufthansa SA or simply Lufthansa on Tuesday cancelled over 800 flights after the pilots called for two days of strikes again over an on-going pay dispute. The pilots strike has cost the Germany carrier losses amounting to hundreds of millions of euros.
Short-haul flights departing across the country were affected on Tuesday, thus leading to 816 flights being cancelled of the 3,000 scheduled departure flights. Additionally, Lufthansa pilots announced their plan to strike on short and long-haul flights on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
The airline has offered to hike the pilots pay by 4.4 percent in two instalments. It has also offered a one-time pay settlement worth 1.8 month's salary. However, the union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) is demanding average annual pay hike of 3.7 percent for its 5,000 odd pilots for a five-time period starting from 2012.
The union has rejected the offer made by the management of the airline.
"For mediation you need an offer that can be the basis of negotiations. Lufthansa has not made such an offer," VC board member Alexander Gerhanrd-Madjidi was quoted as saying by German media.
Germany's biggest airline has had to ground nearly 2,800 flights affecting more than 350,000 passengers since the strike began on November 23. This 14th such strike to hit the airline, it began as a disagreement over pay hike.
Strikes forced Lufthansa to cancel more than 16,000 flights in 2014 and 2015, burdening operating profit by 463 million euros ($523 million), according to Bloomberg.
