MÖRFELDEN-WALLDORF (dpa-AFX) - Lufthansa passengers must reckon with strikes by another professional group. Shortly before the start of the fifth wave of Verdi warning strikes on the ground, the flight attendants voted in favor of strikes with a clear majority of more than 96 percent on Wednesday. This was the result of the ballot at Lufthansa and its regional subsidiary Lufthansa Cityline, as announced by the union Ufo on Wednesday in Morfelden-Walldorf near Frankfurt.

A decision on a possible strike scenario and a date will be made later. Ufo boss Joachim Vázquez Bürger emphasized the determination of the members and the entire cabin, which is also reflected in numerous new members joining the union. A strike is still avoidable: "We remain open to reasonable offers and fair solutions from the employer in order to possibly avert strikes at short notice."

For the approximately 18,000 cabin crew at Lufthansa and the almost 1,000 Cityline employees, Ufo is essentially demanding 15 percent more pay for a contract period of 18 months. The union also wants an inflation adjustment bonus of 3,000 euros and higher bonuses.

In the separate wage negotiations for the Lufthansa parent company and the Regio subsidiary Cityline, the union had rejected the respective offers as insufficient. Against the backdrop of high losses in purchasing power due to inflation, the employees are looking forward to the sharp rise in profits that Group CEO Carsten Spohr intends to present on Thursday (March 7) for the past financial year 2023.

Founded in 1992, the Independent Flight Attendants' Organization (Ufo) is a trade union that exclusively represents flight attendants, primarily at Condor and within the Lufthansa Group. In individual flight operations, it competes fiercely with the DGB trade union Verdi, which also wants to organize flying personnel. Coordinated cooperation between the two rival unions is unlikely.

Until the first strike in 2012, which was also about defending against temporary work, the representation of the mostly service-oriented cabin crew was considered tame. This changed in the following years, when the then chairman Nicoley Baublies led Ufo into the longest strike in Lufthansa's history, lasting eight days, in 2015.

In the post-coronavirus year of 2022, Ufo was the only union in the Lufthansa Group to refrain from taking industrial action. In the collective bargaining agreement, the lower wage groups in particular were raised, while the inflation compensation bonus was postponed to the current collective bargaining round.

A warning strike at the Lufthansa subsidiary Discover this year was the last work stoppage under the leadership of the union, which has had to contend with considerable internal union disputes since 2018. The current chairman Joachim Vazquez Bürger flies for Lufthansa Cityline and was elected in November 2023.

Independently of the Ufo ballot, the Verdi union has called on employees in Lufthansa's technical, logistics and training divisions to go on a warning strike from Wednesday evening at 8pm. All other ground staff are to join the strike at 4 a.m. on Thursday. The warning strike will end for all participants on Saturday at 7.10 am. In addition, aviation security staff in Hamburg and Frankfurt are to strike on Thursday, meaning that no passengers will be able to board flights there on that day./ceb/DP/nas