Hamburg Airport Halts All Flights as Ground Staff Strike
The airport in Germany’s second largest city said the one-day strike, called over pay and conditions, began earlier than expected “without any notice.”The airport in Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, said it had canceled all flights on Sunday because of a one-day strike over pay by ground staff called by a labor union that started its action earlier than expected without little warning.The airport had been expected to carry more than 40,000 passengers on Sunday, with 144 arrival flights and 139 departures, but only 10 flights took place before the strike took hold at 6.30 a.m. local time, Hamburg Airport said in a statement, which directed stranded passengers to contact their airlines. The airport said the strike, called by the labor union Verdi, had begun “without any notice” during a busy holiday.“The union is paralyzing the airport and without notice right at the beginning of Hamburg’s spring break,” Katja Bromm, head of communications at the airport, said in a statement. The airport mainly serves European destinations.The union, which represents public-sector service workers, said it had brought the strike forward by a day and minimized warning of the start time to maximize the pressure on the employer and to prevent the airport from bringing in nonunion workers.“We are very much aware that this strike may have hit families who have saved money to go on holiday, but the employer has left us no other choice,” said Lars Stubbe, the Hamburg representative of Verdi.The strike at Hamburg is the first of more than a dozen planned actions at airports across Germany on Monday, including at the country’s busiest airports, Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin Brandenburg, Mr. Stubbe said.Around 510,000 people will be affected by the strike on Monday, with more than 3,400 flights canceled, according to A.D.V., the association of Germany’s airport operators, German news media reported. The latest strike represents an escalation after Verdi, the full name of which is the Unified Services Union, staged walkouts in February.Mr. Stubbe said that its strikes aimed to increase pressure on employers over stalled collective bargaining talks to improve conditions for more than 25,000 employees in the aviation security sector. Among the union’s demands are 30 days of vacation, additional vacation for shift work and an increase in the annual bonus. The next round of talks is scheduled for later this month.The strikes come amid what is effectively an economic crisis in Germany, traditionally Europe’s powerhouse. The country’s economy shrank slightly last year and it has recovered less well from the pandemic than most of its European peers and the United States.The centrist conservative party, the Christian Democrats, secured the most votes in a parliamentary election last month in a rebuke to the country’s left-leaning government for its handling of the economy and immigration. More
