Before Arbitration Begins
EVG boss threatens long strike
07/16/2023, 6:01 p.m
Deutsche Bahn and the EVG trade union have been at loggerheads for months. The entire second half of July is now running an arbitration process. In the event of failure, EVG chairman Burkert makes it clear that the union has staying power to strike.
Immediately before the start of the arbitration procedure in the collective bargaining dispute with Deutsche Bahn, the railway and transport union EVG underlined its readiness to strike in the event of a failure. “We can hold out a strike for a very long time,” warned EVG chairman Martin Burkert in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. With regard to the difficult wage disputes, he said: “In the end we will be successful, I am very sure of that. We are very serious.”
On Monday (July 17), a new phase in the collective bargaining dispute begins with the arbitration process. In the next two weeks, labor law professor Heide Pfarr and former interior minister Thomas de Maizière, who is a CDU politician, will work out a settlement proposal that they will present to the EVG and Deutsche Bahn at the end of July.
Then not only the national board of the union will decide on the acceptance, but also around 110,000 EVG members who work for the railways. They will be able to vote in a ballot between accepting the settlement proposal and going on an indefinite strike. The hurdles for a labor dispute are particularly high: only if 75 percent of the participants agree can the railway employees start the largest open-ended strike in more than 30 years. The hurdle to accepting the arbitration offer is correspondingly much lower. According to the EVG, the ballot will take a few weeks, so a strike could begin at the end of August at the earliest.
Most recently, the union had rejected the approximately 140-page draft collective agreement both because of the long term of 27 months and because of the amount of the wage increase.