Good news to start the week
The rail strike is expected to end on Monday night
January 27, 2024, 2:30 p.m
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The strike at Deutsche Bahn is set to end earlier than planned. The train drivers want to resume work at 2 a.m. on Monday morning. During the night, the railway and the GdL union surprisingly continued their negotiations. There should be no further strikes for the time being.
The GDL train drivers’ union ends its strike at Deutsche Bahn early. According to information from the German Press Agency, there will be a strike in passenger transport until Monday morning at 2 a.m. The industrial action was originally supposed to last six days and only end on Monday evening. This means that passengers should be able to prepare for largely normal operations again on Monday. The freight transport strike ends on Sunday evening at 6 p.m.
There will be no further strikes for the time being. According to the information, the railway and the GDL have agreed on a peace obligation until March 3rd. The tariffs will be negotiated behind closed doors from February 5th. According to the information, the aim is to reach a collective agreement by the beginning of March. It was already announced this Saturday morning that both sides were in talks again. The strike was the fourth strike since the collective bargaining dispute began.
It started on Tuesday evening for freight traffic and on Wednesday morning for passenger traffic. In the past few days, the railway has offered around 20 percent of the usual long-distance service with an emergency timetable. In regional transport, the effects of the strike, as with previous GDL labor disputes, varied depending on the region.
Signs of negotiation instead of escalation for the first time
With the agreement now reached, there is hope for an early solution to the hardened conflict for the first time in weeks. Collective bargaining between DB and GDL began at the beginning of November. After the first round, GDL boss Weselsky called for a warning strike, after the second round he declared the talks had failed and initiated a strike vote. Since then, the signs have been pointing to escalation rather than negotiation. The focus of the debate recently was the weekly working hours for shift workers: the GDL is calling for a reduction from 38 to 35 hours with the same wages.
The railway has so far rejected this demand. The sticking point is weekly working hours for shift workers. Last week, the group presented an offer that includes 4.8 percent more money for employees from August and a further 5 percent more from April 2025. According to this DB offer, from January 2026, train drivers and train attendants can then decide between a further pay increase of 2.7 percent or one hour less work per week. The GDL was particularly bothered by this offer because of an additional restriction: the DB had made the option available on January 1, 2026, subject to the proviso that there would then be enough train drivers and train attendants employed by the group.