BERLIN: A union representing flight attendants at Lufthansa says its members have voted to accept a pay deal with the airline — averting the possibility of strikes during the holiday season.
The UFO union said 85 percent of members who participated in a ballot on last month’s arbitration settlement voted to accept it. The settlement gives attendants a pay raise that fell short of their demands but included a no-layoff guarantee until the end of 2014, among other concessions by the two sides.
Lufthansa is struggling to compete against European budget carriers and government-owned airlines from the Gulf. Germany’s biggest airline and the union took their dispute to arbitration in September after attendants staged a series of short-term work stoppages that caused the cancelation of hundreds of flights.Lufthansa separately said its passenger numbers fell in November.
A Lufthansa statement said the airline group carried 7.691 million passengers last month, 1.3 percent fewer than in November 2011.
Lufthansa — which also owns Austrian Airlines and SWISS — said the number of passengers on Lufthansa-only flights fell by 2.1 percent to 5.583 million last month.
SWISS passengers were down 0.2 percent at 1.245 million, but the number of passengers flying with Austrian Airlines increased by 2.3 percent to 863,000. And the volume of freight transported by its Lufthansa Cargo unit slid by 2.4 percent to 152,000 tons, weighed down by turbulence related to the global economic slowdown, it said.
Because, however, Lufthansa cut capacity last month, the key seat-load factor, which measures the number of seats filled on flights, increased by 1.4 percentage point to 75.5 percent for the group as a whole. Taking the 11 months to November, however, passenger numbers grew 3.0 percent to 95.95 million for the Lufthansa group as a whole and the seat-load factor advanced by 1.2 percentage point to 78.9 percent.
Lufthansa attendants accept pay settelement
