Pilots and cabin crew at Discover Airlines, the leisure-orientated subsidiary of Germany’s Lufthansa Group, are to hold a one-day strike on Friday in a continuing dispute over delays in agreeing to a collective bargaining agreement.
Discover Airlines was formally known as Eurowings Discover but was rebranded last September in an effort to differentiate the carrier from Lufthansa’s separate Eurowings subsidiary, which operates short-haul services across Europe.
Based out of Frankfurt, Discover Airlines is responsible for operating primarily leisure routes for the Lufthansa Group. The carrier is designed to operate at lower operating costs than its mainline peers, and employees are paid a lot less than their counterparts at Lufthansa.
The carrier now serves 26 destinations across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
Pilots and cabin crew have become increasingly frustrated with the airline’s failure to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for the two groups, and pilots have already staged a one-day strike in the lead-up to Christmas.
Now, both pilots and cabin crew will go out on strike on the same day, with all long-haul departures from Frankfurt set to be disrupted by Friday’s action.
“Our colleagues at Discover have now shown a lot of patience, but unfortunately have to realize that the new year will continue as the old one ended,” commented the Independent Flight Attendant Organization after the strike was announced on Wednesday.
“For a good two years, we have been persistently trying to enter into collective bargaining for cabin crews with the employer in various ways, but are consistently repelled,” the union continued
Union spokesperson Harry Jaeger accused the airline of trying to act like a “hip start-up” that expects employees to accept “far below-average working conditions and insufficient pay just because of a great spirit”.
