Despite billions in government aid, up to 22.000 jobs at the Lufthansa Group are in acute danger. The group wants to restructure itself radically.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG is launching a further austerity program under the project title “ReNew”, which is intended to profoundly change the group. The core of this is the conversion into a holding structure. They want to push ahead with the spin-off of operational Lufthansa into a separate company. The project manager is the board member Detlef Kayser. 

At the beginning of April 2020, the group announced that the fleet would be reduced by 100 aircraft and the subsidiary Germanwings would be liquidated. The restructuring program now resolved by the Board of Management aims to ensure that the loans granted and secured by the Federal Republic of Germany can be repaid. You can see an additional burden in the form of interest payments and repayments over the next few years.

Concrete measures are the downsizing of the executive board of Deutsche Lufthansa AG and the number of members of the executive boards of the subsidiaries Lufthansa Cargo AG, LSG Group and Lufthansa Aviation Group. One manager is saved in each case. As part of the savings program, 20 percent of managerial staff are to be cut across the Group. Lufthansa’s administration is to be reduced by 1.000 jobs.

There are to be further changes in the group fleet. The aim is to reduce the number of individual machine types. The activities of the flight operations are to be bundled, which also includes the tourist offer. For example, the closure of SunExpress Germany, in which it holds around 50 percent, has already been announced. A maximum of 2023 new aircraft are to be accepted across the group by 80. Originally, at least twice that number was planned.

There is also likely to be a major downsizing, as Lufthansa writes in a broadcast that there are currently around 22.000 full-time positions too many. This applies across the group to all companies. Although it is written that redundancies for operational reasons should be avoided, this is not explicitly excluded. According to Lufthansa, a crisis package has so far only been concluded with the flight attendant union UFO.