Flight attendants at the Lufthansa subsidiary are not satisfied. Because the leadership wants to raise their wages much less than they ask for. The word strike is being heard more and more often.
Eight rounds of negotiations have so far failed. The Vida union and Austrian Airlines management were unable to agree on a new collective agreement, as the collective agreement is called in Austria. The staff can hear that the mood among the flight attendants is correspondingly bad.
Conversations are difficult. Because you're moving “between the opposite poles of profit maximization and income maximization,” Vida says. The statements of the flight attendants also confirm this. They explained that early in 2022, many of them were upset that AUA management received a bonus while they themselves had been working short-term for a few months and were making the agreed savings contribution during the pandemic.
“Totally ignored”
Now the mood was finally in danger of changing. Apparently, Austrian Airlines is offering cabin crew a 4.5 percent pay increase. According to Statistics Austria, the inflation rate in Austria was 8.6 percent in 2022 and 7.8 percent in 2023. “In 2023, AUA achieved perhaps the best result in the company’s history and yet it only offers a wage increase within half of inflation. “That's stark,” says one patient.
The goal is to “bring the income of airline employees to the level of similar airlines in order to correct the current low payouts,” says the VIDA union. It has already started a survey among cabin crew at Austrian Airlines to gauge the pulse of the workforce. What is clear is that he is not happy. “The fact that we earn much less than the group average is completely ignored,” explains one of them. The word strike is now being heard more and more often.
Austrian Airlines was forced to cancel a third of its flights
But it's not far away yet. Vida invited employees to a business meeting at Vienna Airport on Friday (March 1). There the union wants to provide information on the status of collective agreement negotiations. Therefore, Austrian Airlines canceled 112 flights out of 302 scheduled for that day. Guests have been rebooked.
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