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Lufthansa machine: waiting for the right time
Photo: Andreas Arnold / dpa
In the Corona crisis, Lufthansa is not ruling out redundancies after the end of short-time work in the coming year. This is being legally prepared, said CFO Remco Steenbergen on Thursday. He put the current staff surplus at 10,000 full-time positions in Germany. In addition, new negotiations are pending with the pilots' union Vereinigung Cockpit and with the service union Ver.di for ground staff, as the agreements with these two will apply until the end of 2021. "We hope that we will come to good agreements on cost reductions in the course of the year and not have to resort to redundancies," said Steenbergen.
Lufthansa's global workforce shrank in the corona crisis from just under 140,000 to around 111,000 women and men.
In Germany, 8,000 employees have left the company so far.
CEO Carsten Spohr added that severance agreements for voluntary resignation are easier to achieve with flight attendants and ground staff than with pilots.
In the cockpit, he is therefore more willing to work part-time.
A large proportion of Lufthansa employees in Germany will be on short-time work until the end of the year.
As long as this applies, it is not possible to terminate the contract for operational reasons, because the time should be used for agreements with the employees on socially acceptable solutions.
Capital increase necessary
Without a capital increase, the group will probably not get along. If the shareholders approve the plan at the general meeting in May, "we have to think about when the right time is for it," said Steenbergen. "It can be this year, but it can also be next year." The manager left it open as to how much money the company would actually like to raise by issuing new shares. But it will be less than the range of 5.5 billion euros that will be voted on at the shareholders' meeting.
In its invitation to the Annual General Meeting at the beginning of April, Lufthansa emphasized that such a capital increase and its amount had not yet been decided.
The requested amount is calculated purely arithmetically from the amount of silent participations I and II that the German Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) made available to the group.
Lufthansa has not yet made use of the larger of the silent participations, which would amount to 4.5 billion euros.
However, the corona pandemic and with it the worst crisis in the history of the aviation industry is not over yet.
mik / Reuters / dpa