Tempers flair as Germany hobbled by huge rail strike

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/15/europe/dbahn.php

FRANKFURT: A bitter, three-day strike by train drivers in Germany has tied up freight traffic, shut down an auto factory, and stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers in what has become the largest work stoppage in the history of the German state railroad system.

Since Thursday morning, when the strike spread from freight trains to commuter and long-distance service, Germans have gotten a taste of the chaos in France, where the public rail transport also remains paralyzed.

But while the French strike is a familiar power struggle between the labor unions and a new government, the German job action reflects what labor experts regard as a bold gamble by an isolated union.

The locomotive drivers' union is going in demanding a 31 percent increase in wages from Deutsche Bahn, the state company that operates Germany's railroads. That would be far more than the company's other, bigger unions, which signed a deal for a 4.5 percent wage increase last July.

Deutsche Bahn has rejected the demand, saying the union's bid for its own wage deal would splinter Germany's tradition of collective bargaining, in which several unions sign on to the same contract.

The union, known by its German initials GDL, claims its members are paid less than drivers in other European countries. It also points to other skilled workers, like pilots and air-traffic controllers, who have begun organizing outside mainstream German unions to defend their interests.

Strikes of this magnitude are extremely rare in Germany, which values consensus in its labor relations, and rarer still when the employer is a state-owned monopoly like Deutsche Bahn. No other big union is supporting the strike, nor is Germany's federation of trade unions.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has so far declined to intervene, but has expressed qualms about giving the union its own contract. Officials on Thursday pleaded with the two sides to sit down for negotiations.

That seems unlikely in the short term, given the stream of vitriol from Deutsche Bahn and the union.

"What I cannot understand is that the country can be raped - as it has been for months now - just because Deutsche Bahn management refuses to take up negotiations," Manfred Schell, the union's tough-talking leader, said during an interview with German public television.

Deutsche Bahn accused the union, which it says represents only 3 percent of the railway's workforce, of seeking to increase its power. "Stop this insanity, Mr. Schell!" it said in a full-page ad in several German papers.

The ocmpany had already sued the union for €5 million, or $7.3 million, in damages from a strike in July.

As both sides dig in, the strike threatens to dent the German economy, which has hummed nicely for the last year but is showing signs of slowing. Deutsche Bahn said the strike was costing €50 million a day.

Audi said it cancelled three shifts at its factory in Brussels because of delays in deliveries of body panels for its cars. The panels are made in Bratislava, in Slovakia, and transported across Germany by train.

"The major problems are in eastern Germany, where there are huge delays," said a spokesman, Eric Felber.

New cars are also piling up outside factories, as Audi and other car makers, which depend heavily on trains, look for other ways to ship them. Hamburg's port has become clogged with containers.

For Deutsche Bahn, the standoff comes at a bad moment. The government hopes to privatize the company, selling as much as 49 percent on the market, by 2009. But even before the strike, the plan was bogging down in squabbles between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, who govern Germany together in an increasingly fractious coalition.

"This strategy isn't very good for Deutsche Bahn's reputation," said Hermann Reichold, a professor of labor law at the University of Tübingen. "They can't afford this kind of chaos."

The stakes for GDL are equally high. Founded in 1867, it is one of Germany's oldest unions. But it has become a renegade, breaking with other unions in wage negotiations with Deutsche Bahn because it felt the interests of its rank and file were not being served.

Critics say GDL is no different than any other German union fighting to stay relevant with an aging membership and dwindling influence. But the union says only 35 percent of its 34,000 members are retired, a number that has not changed in a decade, and that it has not lost members.

"We don't feel isolated," Claus Weselsky, the vice chairman, said during an interview. "We're convinced the future of labor lies in these highly organized unions for specialized workers. The big unions can't serve them."

 

I don't know. People are tired of getting hosed. I quit flying one well-known U.S. based airline when they ditched the employee pension fund, while at the same time their CEO got a salary that year in excess of the company's total reported profit for the whole year. If I board a plane I want to know that the pilot is concentrating on flying. I don't want them worrying about their retirement. That's just my own survival instinct.

Adam

 

Quote: Deutsche Bahn has rejected the demand, saying the union's bid for its own wage deal would splinter Germany's tradition of collective bargaining, in which several unions sign on to the same contract.

Note that Deutsche Bahn did not say they could not afford such a raise, only that they are used to the unions all buying into the same offer. Nobody likes ornery sheep. Frank

 

Thanks for posting that Darren. Interesting read.

 

DB is not a financially healthy railroad. Therefore it is not logic to increase costs. This union wants wages that are the same as airline pilots get...

I understand why DB wants one union agreement instead of many seperate ones. My company (also a railroad) did make seperate agreements with the unions for the several parts of our company, and it did not work: employees in the same company got different agreements and that does not give you the feeling that you work together on the same product. And it becomes so complicated: a lot of talks, a lot of negotiations, and each group gets its own rules, wages etcetcetc. That is why they are giving up the seperate agreements.