A planned strike by German ground staff at the Lufthansa airline on Tuesday and Wednesday has already led to some flight cancellations beginning on Monday evening.
Lufthansa has cancelled dozens of flights at its Frankfurt hub, according to the airport's departure board. Flights within Europe in particular were cancelled, while major intercontinental connections to destinations such as Buenos Aires and Cape Town remained scheduled to take off on Monday.
Lufthansa has warned of major cancellations on Tuesday and Wednesday, when the full strike by ground staff will hit the airline.
Technical, logistics, freight and IT staff will begin striking as early as 8pm (1900 GMT) on Monday, according to verdi negotiator Marvin Reschinsky.
The rest of Lufthansa ground staff at the Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Cologne-Bonn and Stuttgart airports has been called to go on strike beginning at 4 am on Tuesday. Those workers include check-in and boarding gate workers for the airline.
Verdi has called for the strike to end at just after 7 am on Wednesday.
Lufthansa has told passengers to check the status of flights ahead of time online, and for those on cancelled flights not to travel to airports as rebooking counters will not be staffed due to the strike.
The strike is intended to put pressure on Lufthansa over demands for wage increases for roughly 25,000 workers at Lufthansa and its subsidiaries in Germany during ongoing collective bargaining talks.
Lufthansa has announced that it will continue to operate about 10% to 20% of flights during the strike, as the airline did about two weeks ago during another strike by the union.
During the first wave of strikes, Lufthansa and other German airlines were forced to cancel or reschedule about 900 flights, affecting more than 100,000 passengers.
