Lufthansa submits new offer to pilots ahead of strike deadline

BERLIN (Reuters) -Lufthansa has submitted a new offer to the pilots of core brand Lufthansa Airlines and the cargo subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo in an ongoing wage dispute, a spokesperson for the German flagship carrier said on Friday.

With the offer, wage negotiations have begun in earnest, said a spokesperson from the pilots union Vereinigung Cockpit (VC). Exploratory talks had been dragging on for some time, so the VC had asked for a concrete offer at the beginning of June.

The offer comes days before a truce period on strikes runs out on June 30, threatening to disrupt the busy summer season if no agreement is found for the more than 5,000 cockpit employees.

According to a report in the German daily Handelsblatt on Friday, combined with wage increases that were already paid last September, the revised offer amounts to a salary increase of 18.5%, which would be paid over several years until 2025.

In a letter seen by Reuters on Friday, the collective bargaining committee said essential elements from the list of demands were still missing from the offer in a first assessment.

Last summer, pilots at Lufthansa and its budget unit Eurowings paralysed operations with strikes that affected hundreds of thousands of passengers.

(Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach; Writing by Miranda Murray and Anastasiia Kozlova; editing by Matthias Williams and Rachel More)