FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX) - Three years after the founding of the Lufthansa vacation airline Discover, the first collective agreements have been concluded for the company's flying personnel. The airline itself and the trade union Verdi have announced that they have reached agreements on pay and working conditions for both pilots and cabin crew. The corresponding contracts were signed on Friday night.

It remains unclear how many of the approximately 500 employees in the cockpit and the 1,400 in the cabin are organized with Verdi. The Lufthansa Group's established unions Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) and Ufo have already announced their opposition and, in the case of VC, have threatened their employees with strike action. A spokeswoman for the airline explained that it had no knowledge of the respective union affiliation of the employees.

In the Lufthansa Group, Verdi has so far concluded collective agreements for the flight attendants at Eurowings and for the Group's ground staff. According to Verdi, Discover is the first time that it has reached a permanent arbitration agreement with an employer in the Lufthansa Group. This provides for mandatory arbitration in the event of collective bargaining disputes, although the outcome does not have to be accepted.

With 27 Airbus jets, Discover is still a comparatively small vacation airline that operates exclusively from Frankfurt and Munich and is primarily intended to compete with Condor in the tourist business. VC fears that more and more regular Lufthansa flights will be transferred to the more cost-effective subsidiary./ceb/DP/jha