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Airplanes at Frankfurt Airport (symbol image)
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The collective bargaining conflict in the public sector continues to escalate.
Now the union Ver.di wants to strike at several airports.
All-day work stoppages are planned for this Friday in Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Stuttgart, Dortmund, Hanover and Bremen, as the union announced on Wednesday night.
The strikes were supposed to start in the early hours of Friday morning and not end until Saturday night.
Further warning strikes have been announced in Hesse, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia, among others, before the second round of collective bargaining on February 22nd and 23rd.
Whether there will be widespread strikes depends very much on the second round of negotiations, Ver.di chairman Frank Werneke said on Tuesday in ARD's "Morgenmagazin".
He hopes for a fair offer from the employer.
»If not, we are of course in a position to mobilize in the public sector, as well as at the post office and at the airports.
There is a lot of support for our demand.«
Warning strikes in several federal states paralyzed parts of public life as early as Tuesday.
Ver.di was satisfied with the start of the protest.
In the current bargaining round, the service union and the civil servants' association are calling for an increase in income of 10.5 percent, but at least 500 euros more.
Municipal employers reject this as economically unmanageable.
The new collective agreement for the approximately 2.5 million employees in the public sector is to have a term of twelve months.
The second round of negotiations is scheduled for February 22nd and 23rd in Potsdam.
In North Rhine-Westphalia in particular, the strikes caused delays and cancellations in bus and train services.
In Essen, the wheels on the bus and train stood still from 3 a.m., according to a spokesman for the Ver.di union.
According to the transport company, no trams or buses have been running in Cologne since 3 a.m.
The union announced further strikes for Wednesday.
First strikes in the north and south of the country
Around 1,000 employees nationwide took part in the first major warning strikes in Schleswig-Holstein, said the press spokesman for the Ver.di regional association North, Frank Schischefsky.
In Lübeck, around 350 employees of the city administration, the senior citizens' facilities and the waterways and shipping administration followed the strike call, according to union information.
In the Kiel area, the public utilities and the municipal hospital were the focus of the warning strike.
The union called for further warning strikes for Wednesday and Thursday – including in Kiel and in the Schleswig-Flensburg district.
In Bavaria, there were first warning strikes in Würzburg and Aschaffenburg, for example, where local transport and garbage disposal workers stopped working.
Strikes are planned for Wednesday in Augsburg, among other places, where the staff of the day-care centers want to go on warning strikes.
In Rhineland-Palatinate, around 1,400 public sector employees in Landau, Pirmasens and Worms took part in strike events, as Ver.di announced.
"That's far more than we expected," said Jürgen Knoll, Managing Director of the Ver.di district of Palatinate.
According to Ver.di, employees of the Bundeswehr and federal police also took part in the warning strikes.
jok/dpa
