Image: Boris Roessler (dpa)
Deutsche Bahn and the railway and transport union agreed to a settlement before the labor court in Frankfurt am Main, as the railway announced on Saturday. The warning strike has therefore been averted. The “Hessischer Rundfunk” had previously reported on the agreement.
The warning strike would have led to a 50-hour standstill of long-distance traffic, and hardly a train would have been able to run in regional and freight traffic. Despite the court settlement, the railways warned of restrictions in the train service in the next few days. “DB is facing the great challenge of rescheduling around 50,000 train journeys and the associated shift and deployment plans,” it said. The DB wants to provide information about the exact timetable from Sunday afternoon.
Disagreement on the minimum wage
The railway had filed an urgent application with the Frankfurt Labor Court on Friday evening to prevent the warning strike in this way. She rated the planned walkout as “disproportionate”, it harmed customers and “uninvolved third parties”.
The EVG has been negotiating new collective agreements with 50 rail companies since the end of February. From the union’s point of view, the talks with most of these companies are not progressing significantly, including DB. The state-owned company took the position that it had approached the union several times with an offer of a 10 percent wage increase and a concession on the issue of the minimum wage.
The collective bargaining round affects 230,000 employees, 180,000 of whom work for Deutsche Bahn. The EVG asks the industry for 650 euros more per month or 12 percent for the upper income group with a term of 12 months. Among other things, Deutsche Bahn has promised tax- and duty-free one-off payments as well as gradual increases of 10 percent for the lower and middle income groups and 8 percent for the upper income groups.
There is disagreement about the statutory minimum wage, which has so far only been paid to around 2,000 employees in the form of allowances. Both sides are arguing about whether this will be included in the tariff tables before further negotiations and to what extent the further negotiation results will then be taken into account for the lower wage groups.
Source: Nachrichten
