Rail traffic will stand still for 50 hours from Sunday evening. This is unacceptable. The railways and the union must now finally come to an agreement.
Anyone who travels by train is used to grief. Delays and cancellations are the order of the day, as are overcrowded ICEs and problems with the shaky WiFi. But now the EVG union is going one better:
Two days, a total of 50 hours, nothing should work in Germany. standstill on the rails. The longest warning strike in the history of the railways, which seems more like a real, real full strike, only without a ballot. Millions of travelers and tens of thousands of containers do not get from A to B because the railways and the union cannot agree on the wage conflict.
That is difficult to accept – and rightly arouses incomprehension among many people who cannot make it to work or miss important appointments. Yes, the money negotiations are deadlocked. But does that mean everyone has to suffer so much?
Bonuses in the millions despite being unpunctual
Identifying the culprit, the bogeyman in the current wage dispute, is not easy. On the one hand, there is Deutsche Bahn and its management, which, according to research by NDR and “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, allows bonuses totaling three-digit millions to be paid out to itself and thousands of executives, despite extreme unpunctuality and high customer dissatisfaction. That is a bad signal, to say the least, when Human Resources Director Martin Seiler rejects the EVG’s demands for more money as excessive.
In general, Seiler has recently been rather cautious in the negotiations and after the most recent warning strike it took an unusually long time to submit another offer. The union frustration with him and the railway management is therefore somewhat understandable.
And yet, on the other hand, there is also the EVG itself, which is turning up the heat like never before, insisting on maximum demands and showing little willingness to compromise – not least to prove in the dispute with the competing union GDL that they too can go on strike properly. Union boss Kristian Loroch didn’t even want to negotiate the latest proposal from Deutsche Bahn, which is based on the arbitrator’s verdict and the collective bargaining agreement in the public sector.
The recent railway proposal was good
This is something to be proud of: In addition to a tax and duty-free inflation adjustment of a total of 2,850 euros, it provides, among other things, for a gradual increase of a total of 10 percent from March of the coming year. At 27 months, the term of the tariff would be significantly longer than the twelve months required by the EVG. But negotiations are actually there to clarify such questions.
Either way, one thing is certain: more and more warning strikes, more and more new escalations are unacceptable. It is enough.
If there is no sign of a result in the fourth round of negotiations that will hopefully soon follow, then at least the threat of longer strikes must be averted. If there is no other way, even with your own railway arbitrator.
