Huh, sounds like it would have been cheaper to meet the train drivers with a decent wage offer.
But it’s easier to go to the big media outlets and tell the workers “We have to be prepared to work harder and harder again” and “You also have to sweat”, like the bosses of the biggest German bank, Bosch and our finance minister did.
(source)
I believe the liberals are really afraid of a wave of people realizing that working less for the same amount of money is an option. When the train drivers get their 35 hour work week without any pay cuts, there will be more people also taking a liking to that idea. Worst nightmare of the upper class.
The worst nightmare for them would be to realize that striking is the mildest form of worker protest.
Imagine if 50% of all train drivers quit on the same day, then reapplied a month later demanding 50% more pay.
And when they’re rehired, they tell the other drivers how much they now make.
Firstly, the main issue isn’t money it’s working hours.
But even if it were only about money, it wouldn’t really work like that. The strike costs Germany about a billion in GDP. But only a fraction of that is paid for by Deutsche Bahn (the railway company). The losses mostly stem from people and goods becoming less mobile. Deutsche Bahn only loses some income from tickets which is nowhere near that much.
In the end allowing strikes in critical infrastructure isn’t a good idea. Germany has a pretty good solution for that, it’s about making people “Beamte”/officers. These are a special sort of civil servant that will essentially get court martialed for striking but Beamte are also practically unfirable and the constitution (and if it comes to it, the courts) ensures that they get adequate wages.
When Deutsche Bahn was an institution instead of a private company owned by the state Deutsche Bahn employees were (almost?) all Beamte. Some older ones still are (as I said, they can’t be fired) and that’s one of the reasons why some trains are still running. We need to get back to that or at least some rules that mimic the approach.
Any worker has the right to strike. If what is affected is critical infrastructure then the government has to step in on the side of the workers to force a settlement.
Just because you want unlimited flow of treats does not mean laborers should not be able to fight for better working conditions
Civil servants don’t have that right in Germany, at the utmost they can work to rule. OTOH you practically can’t be fired, you can’t be laid off, you get a cushy pension and the state is legally required to have good working conditions, and courts will enforce it for you.
There’s a reason that all those civil servants the DB inherited when it got privatised are still civil servants: The status is actually quite nice. Same goes for Deutsche Post and Telekom, they also still have tons of civil servants they, as private companies, have to treat like the state treats other civil servants.
Oh, side tidbit: Civil servants don’t get days off. They get ordered to recuperate.
There need to be limits. Otherwise we’d have to pay the police and similar groups mid six-figures.
To this day that company never healed from the Beamtentum and never will. Beamte are a horrible solution to anything and should only be a last resort, e.g. for the critical part of infrastructure as the railroad network. Not for the garbage companies operating on it.
Even then you do not need Beamte, you need proper laws regardless. Workers striking is mostly a good thing, even in “critical” infrastructure.
We need Beamte for judges and the like, but that’s it.
For example if most teachers were not Beamte, they could strike and maybe there would be some improvements.
Beamte can effectively strike, too. It’s called Dienst nach Vorschrift (duty by the letter).
They follow every regulation to the letter, which grinds everything to a halt, and there’s hardly anything anyone can do about it since they’re unfirable.
To counter that, the state just pays them well enough so they don’t need to strike.
To add to the absurdity of it, when the leaders of the Bahn announced first that the demand fo the traindrivers is inacceptable as their is no money available, they just had increased their salaries by millions.
Millions are peanuts in this context. We’re talking about costs in the billions.
Not that the Bahn’s board deserved any wage increases, but for this huge company it’s a drop in the bucket.
It’s not that easy to calculate, especially since the 1 billion is about GDP losses, not losses in ticket sales.
I’m also lazy, but I’m willing to bet that the company loses less than 400M. After all the billion is for total costs is alreay on the high end. There are estiomates for a round a third. The unions demands amount to some 10k in costs per member (that’s not what they’d get in hourly wage increases, but what the changes would cost). The union has some 40k members. So we’d be talking about some extra 4 billion. I.e. they’d have to strike for months to make it worth it. Now, not all those members are active, but if they get too much the other (bigger) union will demand more and so on.
For the country it’s a vastly different story. If this were paid for by taxes and increasing GDP were the goal you’d most definitley not budge even slightly on the union’s main demand (shorter working hours) since there’s already a shortage in that area, but there’d be much more generious offers regarding wages. I.e. something like not a cent more for anyone working under 37 hours, but 50% more for people working 40+.
