Lufthansa has welcomed the approval by the members of the Unabhängige Flugbegleiter Organisation (UFO), the union of the company’s crew staff, of the terms and conditions of the proposed new collective labour agreements cabin personnel.

The approval promises longer-term industrial peace on the collective labour agreements front, the airline said in a statement.

The various changes under the new collective labour agreements to the remuneration structure and the retirement and transitional provisions for the Lufthansa cabin crew corps will provide the Lufthansa Group with annual savings in the mid-double-digit-million-euro region; and the terms of the new accords will also remove a high triple-digit-million-euro amount from the Lufthansa Group’s occupational pension commitments.

The vast majority of this will impact on group results for the current year, where it will have a correspondingly positive effect on the annual EBIT (but not on the adjusted EBIT) result, the airline said.

In return for these cost concessions, Lufthansa’s cabin personnel will enjoy increases in their remuneration and guaranteed further employment until 2021.

They will also be able to use any transitional provisions which they elect not to benefit from to increase their later occupational pension entitlements.

Lufthansa’s cabin personnel approved the new collective labour agreement package by a sizeable majority, in a referendum whose voting deadline expired yesterday.

“It’s vitally important to us at Lufthansa that we can now take this path to the future together with our cabin personnel,” said Bettina Volkens, chief officer corporate human resources and legal affairs of Deutsche Lufthansa AG.

“We’re firmly convinced that these new CLAs are a good compromise which both offers attractive benefits and permits savings for our company.”

Both negotiating parties had accepted the recommendations of mediator Matthias Platzeck, including the adoption of a new retirement and transitional provisions system which will remain in effect until the end of 2023.

Under the new system, the company will move from a scheme of guaranteed benefits to one of guaranteed contributions, as has already been agreed for Lufthansa’s ground personnel.