(The following story by Michael Scott Moore appeared at Spiegel.de on August 9.)
BERLIN — Locomotive engineers in Germany want a huge pay raise, but judges kept Deutsche Bahn workers from walking off the job Thursday morning. Still, commuter trains in Hamburg and Berlin stood still for two hours. Is the right to strike sacred or not?
A looming German rail strike seemed to be averted on Wednesday afternoon by a last-minute ruling by a labor court in Nuremberg, which said the engineers’ union had no right to strike until after the summer tourist season. But the locomotive engineers sprang a surprise of their own on Thursday morning: commuter rail drivers (S-Bahn), who belong to the union, halted rush-hour service anyway in Hamburg and Berlin. The management of Deutsche Bahn and the engineers — who had been squatting for days in opposite corners of the wrestling mat, refusing to negotiate — now look ready to talk.
The engineers are pushing for a 31-percent pay raise from the national railway, the Deutsche Bahn. They have a small union in Germany — only 30,000 members belong to the so-called GDL — but they run a crucial sector of the economy, and a nationwide strike could be devastating. They also earn an average of about €2,000 ($2,565) a month, which the engineers argue is peanuts compared to the responsibility borne by an engineer at the head of a speeding train.
The heart of the struggle is whether the engineers should accept salaries in line with the other unions that serve Deutsche Bahn — the majority of other Bahn employees recently won far more modest raises — or negotiate a separate, and much higher, class of pay. “We won’t let anyone touch the principle of a unified system of wage settlements,” Deutsche Bahn CEO Hartmut Mehdorn said in an interview with SPIEGEL this week.
German papers on Tuesday — writing for the most part before news broke of the morning strike — sound almost unanimously sympathetic with the engineers.
The conservative daily Die Welt writes:
“The right to strike is unquestionably sacred, and this also goes for the engineers’ union, which has made fully understandable demands (even if the numbers are arguable). There are, of course, limits to the right to strike, namely wherever a strike would cause unacceptable damage … But is damage to the national economy deep enough to justify rescinding the (engineers’) right to strike? The judges in Nuremburg have said yes … But this was far from the last word; higher courts will have to deal with the case.”
“Deutsche Bahn must quit trying to halt the GDL in the courts, and the engineers need to come to the table. The tactics both sides have used so far will lead to nothing but chaos on the rails.”
The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes, not without sarcasm:
“A ridiculously small fraction of employees is holding out for the lunatic demand of a 31-percent raise, thereby splitting the (Deutsche Bahn) workforce. Economic experts have estimated damages in the hundreds of millions of euros; the government has called for a settlement. But the two sides aren’t negotiating — in the absence of any grand hope for success, Deutsche Bahn has ordered its lawyers to grab the union by the neck.”
“The showdown is about more than just one union vs. Deutsche Bahn. It’s about the foundations of German economic organization. If the freedom to organize (and strike) isn’t an absolute right, where and when does it start? … Small but crucial labor groups will no doubt test this right more often in years to come, encouraged by recent actions by German doctors, pilots and possibly also locomotive engineers. A firm precedent would therefore be welcome.”
The leader of Germany’s Left Party, Oskar Lafontaine, argues in a signed editorial in the left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung:
“The real earnings of Deutsche Bahn employees have been in free-fall since 2005. Taking into account a lengthening of the work day, wages have actually fallen by around 10 percent in the last year. The engineers’ union has reported a loss of real wages over the past three years of nearly 30 percent. In this context the demand of a 31-percent raise doesn’t sound at all shrill.”
The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:
“Germany sees some of the fewest strike days among European countries — not least thanks to the fact that different labor groups can sign their own wage contracts. No one can keep Deutsche Bahn and the GDL from taking their dispute to the courts. But it would be advisable for them to sit at the table and keep the tradition of collective bargaining alive, instead of restricting it within a legal dossier.”
The business daily Handelsblatt argues:
“CEO Hartmut Mehdorn won a grace period in the courts yesterday … He should use it. Because his attempt to tame the recalcitrant GDL in the courts started off on the wrong foot — both politically and legally.”
“His case has no hope in the courts. The arguments used by the Nuremburg labor court to stop the strike will be toppled at the next opportunity, according to all legal experts who know the case. The reason is simple: If the courts take away the GDL’s right to strike in the interests of its own members, the right to organize and strike guaranteed by the German constitution would no longer be worth a cent.”
“Only the big unions in the Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB) can prevent more and more smaller unions from trying their luck with independent wage contracts — namely by forging a politics of wage negotiation that accommodate special interests (within the union) rather than levelling wages out.”