Trainee pilots at Lufthansa will not be hired for jobs they say were promised to them. Now some are taking the Germany’s flagship airline to court.
Alexander Seitz is a pilot who doesn’t mince his words. “Lufthansa has left us in the lurch,” he says. “It’s treated us like indentured servants and left us totally at their mercy.”
Mr. Seitz qualified as a pilot at the company’s renowned pilot training school in Bremen in northern Germany after spending a small fortune on his training. Normally, he would have long since started his career flying for Lufthansa. But the airline hasn’t hired any new pilots since 2014, when CEO Carsten Spohr announced a hiring freeze. So Mr. Seitz’s career is stuck in a holding pattern, along with 850 others trained by the German airline.
Some Lufthansa graduate trainees have been waiting for up to three years to start flying planes for a living. Their frustration and anger is growing. They have financial worries too: a Lufthansa training program can mean debts of up to €120,000 (about $133,000). Lufthansa helps with debt financing, and loans only have to be paid back once the pilot gets a job. But that kind of level of debt can cause enormous stress.
WHY IT MATTERS
Lufthansa isn’t hiring any new pilots at the moment, even its own trainees. At the same time, its low-cast carrier, Eurowings, has an acute shortage of pilots.
FACTS
In 2014, Lufthansa imposed a hiring freeze on pilots, blocking the traditional career path for Lufthansa trainee pilots.
Lufthansa trainees pay their own living costs and take on loans of up to €120,000, payable once they get a job.
Subsidiary Eurowings pays new pilots about €44,000, more than other low-cost carriers, but substantially less than the main Lufthansa airline.
Mr. Seitz is fed up, and he won’t wait any longer. Along with seven other trainee pilots, he intends to take Lufthansa to the Frankfurt labor court over the issue. The legal documents are almost ready and the case will likely be filed within the next two weeks. On Thursday, the pilots plan to stage a demonstration in front of Lufthansa headquarters at Frankfurt airport. They will also hand over a petition.
“We’re fighting it like this because we’re in despair,” said Mr. Seitz. “We’re not going to put up with this.”
No one knows if their case has a chance. There are extraordinarily complex legal issues that the judges will have to weigh. The pilots will point to a passage in their contracts for the training which promises them a job with Lufthansa on a well-paid, union-negotiated contract “should need arise.” As the trainee pilots see it, there is unquestionably a “need” for their services.
Mr. Seitz is fed up, and he won’t wait any longer. Along with seven other trainee pilots, he intends to take Lufthansa to the Frankfurt labor court over the issue. The legal documents are almost ready and the case will likely be filed within the next two weeks. On Thursday, the pilots plan to stage a demonstration in front of Lufthansa headquarters at Frankfurt airport. They will also hand over a petition.
“We’re fighting it like this because we’re in despair,” said Mr. Seitz. “We’re not going to put up with this.”
No one knows if their case has a chance. There are extraordinarily complex legal issues that the judges will have to weigh. The pilots will point to a passage in their contracts for the training which promises them a job with Lufthansa on a well-paid, union-negotiated contract “should need arise.” As the trainee pilots see it, there is unquestionably a “need” for their services.
According to airline industry insiders, thanks to a hiring freeze that Mr. Spohr introduced, Lufthansa pilots are operating at the limits of capacity and a high rate of sick leave. But the judges in the case may not necessarily follow the pilots’ arguments. There’s no growth at the airline’s core operating business. In fact, it is cutting capacity. A Lufthansa spokesman is confident the airline will win in court: “We’re absolutely certain there has been no breach of contract here.”
The dispute with the junior pilots has been bubbling over for 18 months now. For Mr. Spohr, a former pilot himself, there is an obvious solution: the pilots are more than welcome to apply to Eurowings, the company’s low-cost carrier. But his message at Lufthansa is clear: there is no chance at the moment of them being hired to fly for the core Lufthansa-brand airline. It would simply be prohibitively expensive in large part due to the generous contract terms enjoyed by Lufthansa pilots.
Paradoxically, Eurowings is suffering from an acute shortage of pilots. So in theory there are plenty of jobs on offer for the trainee pilots to move into. But the pilots are not impressed with employment conditions at Lufthansa’s low-cost carrier. Eurowings employees get far less pay. A co-pilot starting out can expect to earn about €44,000 a year. That’s more than they could make at other low-cost airlines, like Ryanair or Easyjet, but it’s about €20,000 a year less than they would make at Lufthansa. Further up the pay scales, the salary gaps between Eurowings and Lufthansa are even greater.
One factor in the Eurowings pilot shortage is the company’s insistence on psychological testing. Last year, the carrier pledged only to hire pilots who have passed the German Aerospace Center’s aptitude test, which includes rigorous psychological assessment. Lufthansa-trained pilots all must pass this test, unlike most other pilots on the market.
This limits the pool of candidates for Eurowings. But the issue is a particularly sensitive for the Lufthansa Group. In March 2015, Andreas Lubitz, a co-pilot for another Lufthansa subsidiary, Germanwings, deliberately crashed an Airbus A320 in the French Alps, killing himself and 149 other people.
Lufthansa’s senior management find it difficult to accept the attitude of the junior pilots, according to company insiders. The airline has promised to adjust down the pilots’ loan repayments to fit with the more modest Eurowings salary. Lufthansa also points to job opportunities elsewhere in the Lufthansa Group, for example at its subsidiaries Swiss and Austrian Airlines. But here too, conditions of employment are far less lucrative to what pilots at the main Lufthansa airline earn.
Many of the trainee pilots find such offers unacceptable. They insist they were promised a job with the core Lufthansa-branded company and fear that taking a job with Eurowings would permanently exclude them from the parent company. “We chose this training course because there was a clear prospect of a Lufthansa job,” said Mr. Seitz. He added that only very few of the trainee pilots have applied to Eurowings.
Switching to another airline is not an option either, said Mr. Seitz. If they were to do that, Lufthansa would immediately call in their loans. In addition, the pilots would have to undergo further training. Basic pilot training is not in itself a qualification to fly. Pilots have to receive additional training called “type rating”: certification that they can fly a specific type of aircraft. But the hiring freeze means there is no chance to become certified on Lufthansa’s Airbus 320s.
Both sides of the dispute are taking an increasingly firmer stance. “We’d have expected Lufthansa to make some kind of conciliatory gesture, like writing off some of our loans,” said Mr. Seitz. “But they haven’t done anything like that yet.” Last July, the trainee pilots held a protest demonstration outside the Lufthansa training school in Bremen. But the company hasn’t budged an inch, he said.
Now the trainees want their day in court. It could be their last chance. They are well aware that a court case is a perilous undertaking. Those risks are probably why only eight of the 850 trainees stuck in a holding pattern at Lufthansa have joined the law suit. To be on the safe side, they have taken out legal insurance to help pay the bills. Safety, after all, is a pilot’s first priority.
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