Discussions adjourned by mutual agreement
Bahn and EVG will continue to negotiate next week
6/16/2023, 7:44 p.m
The negotiations between the railways and the EVG union are about the core: How high is the wage increase and how long does the new collective agreement run? After five days of marathon talks, the breakthrough does not succeed until the evening, but solutions are probably within reach.
Collective bargaining at Deutsche Bahn will be postponed to next week. This was announced by the railways and the railway and transport union EVG in the evening after five days of negotiations in Berlin. “We negotiated intensively and reached an agreement on many issues,” said DB HR Director Martin Seiler. The railway and transport union EVG announced that they would like to inform their decision-making bodies about the current status of negotiations at the beginning of next week. “We have worked out numerous compromise lines in the past few days and now want to discuss them in detail with the responsible decision-making bodies,” said EVG collective bargaining board member Kristian Loroch. According to the EVG, work stoppages at Deutsche Bahn are excluded until the next round of talks.
Towards the end, it was still about the pay increases and the term of the collective agreement – the core of the negotiations. In an interim report on Wednesday, the union emphasized that there was a lot of potential for conflict. The EVG has so far largely paralyzed rail traffic twice in the collective bargaining round with warning strikes. A planned 50-hour strike in May was canceled at short notice after a legal dispute at the labor court in Frankfurt am Main.
What the EVG demands and the DB offers
The EVG wants to achieve a fixed salary increase of at least 650 euros per month or twelve percent more for the upper wage groups for a good 180,000 employees at Deutsche Bahn (DB). According to their ideas, the term should be twelve months. Deutsche Bahn had recently promised twelve percent more in several stages for the lower wage groups over a period of 24 months. The middle groups should get a total of ten percent more and the upper groups eight percent. The first stage of the increase should therefore be due this year. In addition, there is an inflation compensation premium in several payments totaling 2850 euros, which is tax and duty-free.
According to both sides, the negotiations were intensive and constructive until Wednesday. Should the EVG ultimately declare the negotiations to have failed, a strike ballot could then follow for an indefinite period.