Union dismisses airline's offer as 'scandalous'
"With the start of today's shift, a strike at all large airports has begun," Martina Soennichsen, a spokeswoman for German trade union Verdi said on Monday.
In Frankfurt alone, 2,000 Lufthansa employees started industrial action beginning at 3:00 a.m. GMT.
Overall, around 1,700 flights will be cancelled, Lufthansa said.
That leaves just 20 of its regular European short-haul flights running and only a handful of long-haul flights out of Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf. The strikes will cost the airline tens of millions of euros.
Verdi, which represents 33,000 workers, is asking for a 5.2 per cent pay rise and job guarantees.
Lufthansa made a new offer last week to raise salaries by 1.2 per cent from October this year and a further 0.5 per cent a year later, in a deal that would run for 29 months and would not contain job guarantees.
Verdi dismissed the offer as "scandalous."
