A two-day works council forces Austrian Airlines to cancel a quarter of its flights

An Austrian Airlines pilots and flight attendants works council on Tuesday 6 March (from 5:00 PM) and on Wednesday 7 March 2018 (from 06:00 AM) has forced the airline to cancel one out of four scheduled flights on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning.

Flights between Vienna and Amsterdam, Basel, Brussels, Budapest, Bucharest, Dusseldorf, Yerevan, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hamburg, Cologne / Bonn, Copenhagen, Leipzig, Lyon, Milan, Munich, Prague, Salzburg, Sofia, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Venice, Zagreb and Zurich have been affected.

Customers who have provided their telephone number or e-mail address during the booking, as well as members of the Miles & More frequent flyer program, will automatically be informed by SMS or e-mail about changes in their flight schedule. All other passengers are asked to check the current status of their flight before leaving for the airport. In case of cancellation, passengers are requested to check their itinerary on the Austrian Airlines homepage under “My booking”.

From mid-february union Vida already announced the industrial actions: “Austrian Airlines offers us an inflation compensation of 2.1% and a one-off payment of 1.4%, which we simply can’t accept as there have been virtually no increases since 2012“, Rainer Stratberger, union representative and Austrian Airlines pilot said, “For example, a young flight attendant will only earn a little bit more than the targeted minimum wage of €1,500 without extra pay for Sunday work.”

“We have taken precautionary measures and cancelled around 25% of our flights. In total, around 10,000 passengers are currently affected by those cancellations. We sincerely apologize for these inconveniences“, Austrian Airlines spokesman Peter Thier said. “We strongly believe that these two days of union meetings are completely disproportionate,” Thier added.