BERLIN (Reuters) – Travellers faced flight cancellations across Germany on Tuesday as security staff at several airports staged another one-day strike amid a wage dispute.
The walkout comes after airlines, which are reeling from soaring fuel prices and airspace closures due to the war in Ukraine, had to cancel hundreds of flights to and from German airports due to strikes last week Monday and Tuesday.
Labour union Verdi called the strike for this Tuesday at Frankfurt, Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, Stuttgart, Duesseldorf and Cologne/Bonn airports.
Duesseldorf airport said airlines had cancelled 140 out of a planned roughly 260 flights to and from the western German city for Tuesday. At Cologne/Bonn, 73 out of 123 flights have been cancelled.
Verdi is demanding that employers raise the wages of the around 25,000 airport security employees in Germany by at least 1 euro an hour for the next 12 months and that staff in different parts of the country earn the same.
BDLS, the association of aviation safety companies, has said that all of Verdi’s demands combined amounted to pay increases of up to 40% and were “utopian.”
A next round of wage talks has been scheduled for Thursday.
(Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Editing by Paul Carrel)
