Around a million letters and several hundred thousand packages were left behind on Monday. And the warning strike continues.
The Verdi union continued the warning strikes at the post office on Tuesday with walkouts in letter and parcel centers and in delivery. “It’s got off to a good start everywhere, high participation, the atmosphere is good,” said a union spokesman in Berlin. This means that millions of letters and hundreds of thousands of packages are likely to be left behind again. With the industrial action, the union wants to emphasize its demands in the current collective bargaining round.
Verdi has called on postal workers in Dortmund, Hamburg, Saarbrücken, Nuremberg, Frankfurt/Main and Stuttgart to hold protest rallies. According to union information, around 8,000 postal workers had already stopped work on Monday. According to Swiss Post, this slowed down the delivery of around one million letters and several hundred thousand packages.
The union is demanding 15 percent more wages and salaries for around 160,000 employees in the Post & Parcel Germany sector. The demand is justified, among other things, with the high inflation. “Our members are taking to the streets because they simply cannot afford to lose purchasing power,” said Verdi negotiator Andrea Kocsis.
The Post reacted with incomprehension to Verdi’s actions. A company spokesman said at the beginning of the week that the group had already announced an offer for the next round of collective bargaining on Wednesday and Thursday. The recent warning strikes are therefore exaggerated. The behavior of the union is at the expense of the customers of the group. The Swiss Post rated the amount of the tariff demand as “not justifiable”.
There had already been warning strikes on several days in January. Most recently, 20 percent of parcels and 9 percent of letters were not delivered due to outstanding deliveries on one day.
Source: Stern
