Lufthansa announced that the Covid-19 pandemic could trigger an unprecedented wave of redundancies. I am 30 jobs put at risk in Europe's main carrier since the collapse of air transport following the spread of infections.
“We are determined to maintain at least 100 of the 130 positions in the group,” he wrote Carsten Spohr, CEO of Lufthansa, in a letter sent to employees on Sunday. The text was released by the French news agency AFP.
In September, the German giant of the skies had already announced its intention to cut more than the 22 jobs already envisaged in the plan released last spring. Now the precise number has also arrived: 30 thousand.
“After a summer that gave us hope, now we feel effects on our business equivalent to those of the lockdown”, Carsten Spohr explained again in the letter to the workers.
Between June and August, during the period of the summer holidays and the slowdown of the epidemic in Europe, air traffic had recorded a slight recovery. Now, however, that the infections have soared again across the continent, mobility has collapsed again and the effects on airline budgets are once again being felt heavily.
"Winter 2020/2021 will be a great challenge – continues the CEO of Lufthansa, who also heads Austrian Airlines, Swiss and Brussels Airlines – We must step up our efforts to continue to reduce costs”. It won't be easy and certainly the reduction in personnel will not be enough: Lufthansa loses a million euros every two hours, while at the beginning of the pandemic it had lost a million an hour. But the prospects are for a further deterioration.
In particular, the group expects that this winter the volume of activities will not go beyond 20% of that recorded in 2019-2020. In all likelihood, therefore, Lufthansa will therefore have to ground another 125 aircraft, out of a fleet of 763, flying at only 25% of its capacity.
Not only that: “We must assume – concludes Spohr – that the consequences of the pandemic on our business will be felt in the years to come".
