Germans Can Joke: Lufthansa CEO Suggests Worst Labor Negotiator Ever

By: Ben Schlappig

Published: March 12, 2015

12 comments

You’ve gotta love Akbar Al Baker, Qatar Airways’ CEO. He’s hands down the most prolific character in the airline industry. And I have such mixed feelings about him. On one hand I appreciate his passion and no-nonsense approach to things, on the other hand hand I don’t appreciate the way employees are treated, and how he’s dishonest about how he runs his airline.

Qatar-Airways-A350-Business-Class-28

But you’ve gotta love when other airlines joke about him.

Lufthansa is having huge issues with their unions at the moment, in particular with their pilots union. In 2014, Lufthansa’s pilots went on strike 10 times over early retirement benefits, which apparently cost the airline over 200 million Euros.

So what solution does the Lufthansa CEO have, via Arabian Business?

Lufthansa’s latest offer to German pilots has been rejected by their unions this week, but the flag carrier’s CEO has joked in an exclusive interview with Arabian Business that his back-up plan may be to hire outspoken Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker as his union advisor.

And for a bit of context on Al Baker and his thoughts on unions:

A well-known outspoken opponent of trade unions is Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker, who two years ago riled international union bosses when he said they were partly to blame for the stagnant growth and unemployment problems faced by the western world during the global economic crisis.

“If you did not have unions you wouldn’t have this jobless problem in the western world… It is caused by unions making companies and institutions uncompetitive and bringing them to a position of not being efficient,” Al Baker told Arabian Business in an interview.

“If you go and ask the politicians in most of the countries in the western world they would love to have the system we have: where the workers have rights through the law but they do not have rights through striking and undermining successful institutions that provide jobs to their knees,” he added.

Too funny! And this comes shortly after Al Baker says the only reason Qatar Airways flies the A350 to Frankfurt is to “rub salt in the wound” of Lufthansa.

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Al Guest

March 13, 2015, 7:52 am

Right on Betty.

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McMunch Guest

March 13, 2015, 3:12 am

@Snic is actually straight up correct, and makes some very well articulated points. I've worked non-union and union jobs and am currently in a union position as a nurse-and there is no comparison. Unions give you a voice at the table and I'm sorry, @Ron that is just the plain truth. It's total folly to blame the problems of the world on unions. Unions created the middle class in this country and if you look closely at EXACTLY when the middle class began to slip in the United States it was EXACTLY when union membership began its decline. I don't much care about Qatar Airlines because I'm not ever going to fly them. I'll stick with union carriers thanks. And Lufthansa has done a pretty good job at creating a world class airline-even with a union.

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Ron Guest

March 13, 2015, 12:54 am

@snic - Your understanding of the dock strike speaks volumes. Piece of advice: Certainty only impresses the ignorant.

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Kieran Guest

March 12, 2015, 10:17 pm

Unions, in a perfect world, would be a vehicle for providing a collective voice for workers and a collaborative partner in business. Sadly we do not live in a perfect world, and like pretty much all organisations, unions look after themselves first and foremost (just like businesses look after themselves first and foremost) with employees/society/etc coming off quite a distance behind. Ideally win-win outcomes for everyone would sought all the time, but the reality is mutually beneficial outcomes are of less interest to the players than knocking everyone else on the hill in the quest for dominance over all (it's an antagonistic rather than collaborative system, and getting worse as every year passes).

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snic Diamond

March 12, 2015, 9:03 pm

And yet, Brian, in some parts of the world (e.g., India), workers' lives are little different nowadays than they were here in Upton Sinclair's time - and guess what? In India they have just as many cell phones and just as much access to Twitter and the internet as we do. Technology is not going to protect us. At the same time, back here at home, wages are stagnant even as the economy has been steadily recovering. Now, why might that be? Maybe because workers have so little pull nowadays, both political and with their employers, because unions are so rare and weak? That might not be the whole story, but it's part of it. And Ron, as for longshoremen: I hardly think they are a "tremendous drag on the economy." Gee, guys doing hard work and getting paid a decent wage for it, and refusing to be exploited. What a concept. It sure sounds foreign nowadays. Maybe that's why you find it so troublesome.

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