A new round of strikes on Monday grounded nearly all flights at Germany’s Cologne Bonn Airport and the majority at nearby Duesseldorf were canceled or diverted, with the industrial action also impacting local transportation, day care facilities and local administration in the country's most populous region.
Cologne-Bonn airport said that all but two of the day’s 136 planned flights wouldn’t depart from or arrive there, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported.
In Dusseldorf, only 89 of the planned 330 flights were expected to take place as scheduled, with most of the rest being canceled. It said 29 flights were diverted to other airports and seven were rescheduled for the next day.
The action is the latest in a series of strikes and protests that have hit major European economies, including France, Britain and Spain, as higher food and energy prices knock incomes and living standards after the COVID-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine.
The one-day "warning strike" by airport security staff comes amid difficult pay talks for employees of Germany’s federal and municipal governments and for airport security staff.
Walkouts planned Monday also were set to affect buses and trams in parts of the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, as well as day care centers for children and other services.
"If the employers continue to be obstructionist and do not present us with results, then the reaction of the employees here is clear," a Verdi trade union spokesperson said at Cologne Bonn airport.
Verdi announced the strike on Friday after it said collective bargaining efforts for public service workers and aviation security workers had failed to come closer to an agreement.
The airports, which service airlines including Lufthansa, Turkish Airlines (THY) and Aegean Airlines, were largely empty because passengers had been informed of the strike in time to change their plans.
The union brought air traffic to a standstill earlier this month with one-day strikes at seven major airports, including the Frankfurt and Munich hubs, affecting nearly 300,000 passengers.
Cities across the western state of North Rhine Westphalia, including Cologne, Leverkusen and Bonn, were also affected by public service worker strikes on Monday.
An agreement in negotiations on behalf of more than 2.5 million employees of the federal government and local authorities is a long way off, Verdi says.
Unions are seeking a 10.5% pay raise, while employers so far have offered an increase totaling 5% in two stages and one-time payments of 2,500 euros ($2,630) per employee – which unions have rejected as insufficient.