Lost ability to negotiate?
Bahn sues GDL over temporary employment agency
January 2, 2024, 7:35 p.m
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The train drivers’ union GDL has founded a temporary employment agency and wants to poach employees from the railway in order to then loan them out to companies. To this end, she has concluded a collective agreement with the new company. In the opinion of the railway, this is a questionable construct that a court should now evaluate.
In the collective bargaining dispute with the GDL, Deutsche Bahn says it is taking legal action against the train drivers’ union. A railway spokesman said the company had filed a so-called declaratory judgment action with the Hessian State Labor Court. In this way, the railway will clarify in court whether the GDL has lost its ability to negotiate collective agreements through its temporary worker cooperative Fair Train. The union did not initially comment. In the ongoing collective bargaining, Deutsche Bahn and GDL are fighting for higher wages, but above all for shorter working hours for shift workers.
The background to the lawsuit that has now been filed is that the union founded a kind of temporary employment agency for train drivers, the Fair Train cooperative, and concluded a collective agreement with it. According to its own information, Fair Train received permission from the responsible authority to hire out workers last September and has since been looking for train drivers to hire out to “well-known customers” “across the country”. The railway accuses the GDL of acting as an employer and a union at the same time.
The GDL’s collective bargaining conflict with the railways is now deadlocked. The GDL accused the railway of blocking the central demand for a reduction in working hours with full wage compensation and declared the negotiations to have failed in December. In a strike vote by union members, they voted by a large majority to expand the industrial action, and strikes lasting several days are threatened starting next Monday.