The wage dispute over the holiday airline Discover Airlines is coming to a head in the Lufthansa Group. Two major unions, the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) and the cabin crew union Ufo, are planning coordinated strike action. Ballots are to begin on Thursday, August 15, 2024, to decide on possible industrial action. The vote is to last until Wednesday, August 21, 2024, and could lead to another strike. The tense situation is the result of the collective bargaining agreement that Lufthansa and the rival union Verdi recently reached at Discover Airlines. The agreement includes salary increases, allowances, special payments, and improvements to company pension plans and duty rosters. The contracts are to apply until the end of 2027 and were agreed three years after the founding of Discover Airlines. Verdi celebrated this agreement as a success, especially since the union had previously been represented in the Lufthansa Group mainly among ground staff and in the Eurowings cabins. A collective bargaining agreement for pilots only exists at the cargo subsidiary Aerologic. But this success of Verdi is not without controversy. The Cockpit and Ufo associations have sharply criticized the collective agreement. They accuse Verdi of having a small membership base among the approximately 1900 flight personnel employees and thus not being legitimate to conclude a collective agreement. According to Ufo collective bargaining expert Harry Jaeger, Verdi is "an illegitimate employee representative" that was appointed by management. Union power struggle The main demand of VC and Ufo is to enforce their own, competing collective agreements at Discover Airlines. This could be achieved through a strike. Such a conflict would not be new: VC pilots had already gone on strike at Discover Airlines last winter in order to enforce the first collective agreements. At the time, Ufo called for a