Because Germany risks paralysis
Germany will be blocked again between Thursday and Friday due to simultaneous strikes at Lufthansa and Deutsche Bahn. Facts and insights
It is not an easy time for Germany on various fronts. Political, with government and chancellor on the grill every day; military, with the army overheard by the Russians in consultation briefings on sending weapons (and the infamous Taurus missiles) to Ukraine; economic, with growth estimates for the coming months not offering much hope.
GERMANY RISKS PARALYSIS THIS WEEK
But the front that most of all creates concrete inconveniences for citizens at the moment is that of mobility. Strikes are multiplying and towards the weekend a new peak of difficulty will be reached. Lufthansa ground crew operators and Deutsche Bahn train drivers will join hands between Thursday and Friday. The country risks paralysis.
The disputes are naturally different, but the roughness of the negotiations, the inability of the parties to find a compromise after months of meetings says a lot about the climate of conflict that is affecting the country. Needs and expectations of workers who clash with the constraints of company budgets.
THE ABSTENTION OF LUFTHANSA GROUND STAFF
The Lufthansa strike, called by the ver.di union, will begin at 4am on Thursday 7th March and end at 7am on Saturday 9th. For the ground staff these are economic issues. Green negotiator Marvin Reschinsky used somewhat populist tones to illustrate workers' frustration: “No one can understand that Lufthansa will announce record annual results this week, that bonuses for board members will be increased substantially and that local employees with hourly wages of 13 euros in some cases no longer even know how to make ends meet if they live in the most expensive cities in Germany,” he said.
The tug of war over the contract concerns 25 thousand ground service workers, has already had two abstentions from work and will resume on 13 and 14 March for the fifth round of negotiations. The third strike – which the airline naturally criticized – serves to put even more pressure on the new top management.
DEUTSCHE BAHN, THE FIFTH TRAIN DRIVERS' STRIKE
This time, those who cannot travel by plane will not be able to do so by train either. More or less at the same time, the train drivers of the GDL union once again crossed their arms. The abstention starts at 2am on Thursday 7 March and will end at 3pm on Friday 8. For freight trains the strike begins the day before, on Wednesday 6 at 6pm. The main one, which concerns passengers, will therefore last 35 hours. For GDL secretary Claus Weselsky it is a symbolic figure: “Thirty-five hours so that everyone in the country realizes what we are talking about: the 35-hour week,” he said.
In this case, in fact, the point of misunderstanding is not wages, but working conditions. The union complains of an excessive workload for train drivers, aggravated by the continuous cuts that have affected the company in recent years, and asks for the reduction of working hours from 38 to 35 hours per week at the same tariff conditions. “It is GDL that has already made extensive concessions in this round of collective bargaining and it is the railway management that does not move an inch and is pushing union members into further strikes,” Weselsky added.
On the railway side, this is the fifth strike in this round of negotiations. The confrontation has been going on for many months now without the parties having made substantial progress and the uncertainty involving Deutsche Bahn travelers is seriously damaging the company's image and business, which is not experiencing a successful season in terms of services, that of punctuality in the first place.
The stop of trains also involves the partial blocking of metropolitan services, those of the S-Bahn lines (generally surface) in many large cities, which are managed by Deutsche Bahn. City mobility will therefore be restricted to underground metro lines (U-Bahn), buses and trams, services managed by local companies.
But for GDL the battle doesn't stop this week. While the dates of a new meeting with the counterpart are still uncertain (the last table was canceled just last Friday), Weselsky announces that after the strike on Thursday and Friday new abstentions from work will be called in waves in the following weeks, without even the 48 hours notice. The Easter holidays are also at risk.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/perche-la-germania-rischia-la-paralisi/ on Tue, 05 Mar 2024 06:37:08 +0000.