Thursday June 24th 2021
Ballot scheduled
Train drivers strike in August at the earliest
The all-clear at the beginning of the summer holidays in several countries: there will be no strikes at the railroad for the time being. The train drivers’ union GDL wants to get the approval of the members for further steps. But work could then be stopped in August.
Deutsche Bahn passengers can breathe a sigh of relief – at least for the time being: there are no threats of strikes until August. The union of German locomotive drivers (GDL) wants to first call its members to a ballot, as the chairman Claus Weselsky said in Berlin. “The GDL will not call for warning strikes of a few hours or a day. They will first hold a ballot,” said the union. This will be counted on August 9th.
A good two weeks ago, the union announced the failure of collective bargaining and announced “industrial action”. According to the vocabulary, this includes warning strikes and other actions as well as a strike vote on regular strikes.
Just a few days ago, Weselsky announced that the strikes would be harder and longer than in the past. In 2014/2015, GDL members went on strike in eight waves and initially stopped work for hours and, after a ballot, for several days.
Bahn and GDL hold each other responsible for the failure of previous collective bargaining. The GDL is calling for wage increases, as in the public sector, of around 3.2 percent and a significant corona bonus in the current year. According to Deutsche Bahn, the total demands add up to about three times as much. Because of the pandemic, the company wants to orientate itself on the “emergency collective agreement” of the airports, which would spread a similar increase of 3.2 percent over a longer period of time and later incremental points.
The rival union EVG had already signed a collective agreement last autumn. From the beginning of 2022, employees will receive 1.5 percent more money – little compared to collective bargaining rounds in better times. For this, compulsory redundancies are excluded until the end of 2023. The GDL now wants to get more out of strikes.
Deutsche Bahn has repeatedly asked the union to return to the negotiating table. There are well-founded offers for more wages and additional protection against dismissal on the table, about which the GDL top has refused serious negotiations, a spokeswoman said. After the tough months of the pandemic, the GDL wanted to destroy the spirit of optimism. Rising booking numbers had just given the state-owned company hope for a respite in the corona crisis. The crisis tore a gap of more than four billion euros in 2020 alone, and the already heavily indebted group expects the pandemic to cause total damage of around ten billion euros by 2024.
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