Empty train stations and airports have become a common sight in Germany in recent weeks.
Traveling has become unpredictable in Europe's largest economy, which has been facing several worker strikes for months, especially in the transport infrastructure sector.
The unions demand a salary increase to compensate for the bite of inflation and a cut in working hours.
The last day of strikes took place this week and twice.
On the one hand, the German train drivers union GDL called a 35-hour strike from Thursday to Friday in the framework of its wage dispute with the German railway company Deutsche Bahn.
On the other hand, the ground staff of the German airline Lufthansa began a new 59-hour strike last Wednesday afternoon.
Added to this was the security personnel at the Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Hamburg airports who stopped working until midnight on Thursday, completely paralyzing the entry of new passengers.
Salary conflicts are thus worsening in a country that faces a difficult situation after closing 2023 in recession, according to more and more experts.
From an economic point of view, the strikes and protests come at an inopportune moment in which the forecasts for the German economy are still far from being those desired, as the German Executive has recently warned by reducing its growth forecast for this year to a stunted 0.2%.
The new GDP projection has been described as “dramatically bad” by the German Economy Minister, Robert Habeck, who has warned that Germany “cannot continue like this.”
Meanwhile, the Berlin economic institute DIW stated this Thursday that “the German economy is not picking up speed as quickly as expected” and predicts stagnation for this year as a whole.
This economic weakness reduces the willingness of businessmen to make concessions, according to the Cologne IW Economic Research Institute.
It coincides with the hangover from the inflationary crisis in which workers and families have lost purchasing power.
Thus, unions have taken the lead in an environment in which companies are tightening their belts, which makes it difficult to reach agreements and causes conflicts to intensify.
Economists believe that the unions' demands are justified.
High energy costs and rising prices not only affect the companies themselves, but also their employees.
“And they simply need more money in their portfolios, since real incomes have been reduced recently due to high inflation,” says ING chief economist Carsten Brzeski to the German public broadcaster ARD.
In 2023, with an inflation rate of 5.9%, very few workers saw a real increase in their checking account.
Prices sometimes rose faster than wages.
“We have weak private consumption in Germany, which means we need higher wage agreements,” adds Brzeski.
“The unions went on the offensive to regain purchasing power,” explains Hagen Lesch, an expert in collective bargaining at the IW.
Another problem emerges in the worsening work environment: the current labor shortage that Germany is suffering from.
For the unions, this means a “power resource”, since if there are unfilled vacancies, a higher price is demanded, explain the country's main economic institutes.
On the other hand, when unemployment is high, unions lose power and wage demands are lower.
This power is evident in the negotiations of the GDL machinists' union, which has made it clear that its demand for a 38- to 35-hour workday with a full monthly salary is not negotiable and that it is only willing to make concessions on how to apply it in a way gradual.
Furthermore, they do not hesitate to call strikes at the last minute like this week, also coinciding with a holiday Friday and the end of the Berlin International Tourism Fair (ITB).
Now it remains to be seen which other sectors will go on strike throughout this year.
According to the collective bargaining archive of the Institute for Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation, closely linked to the unions, collective wage agreements agreed only by the unions of the German Federation of Trade Unions DGB will expire for almost twelve million employees between December 2023 and December 2024.
In September, for example, collective bargaining will begin in the metal and electrical industry, the largest collective bargaining sector with more than 3.6 million employees.
However, Lesch, an IW expert, assumes that the upcoming wage conflicts this year will have less impact than the current ones in the aviation and railway sectors.
“When the big airline, air safety and railway conflicts are over, we won't notice them as much as we do now.”
However, there can always be surprises.
But are the strikes in Germany more intense than before?
Yes, at least in the opinion of the IW, which has had a points system since 2010 to measure the extent of salary conflicts in certain sectors.
“Since 2010, we have not had a conflict score as high as last year,” they explain about something that in their opinion will remain the same in 2024.
However, according to other experts, labor protests have by no means reached their most serious form.
“That would be indefinite strikes and we don't have them yet,” declared social scientist Irene Dingeldey, from the Institute of Labor and Economics at the University of Bremen, to the DPA agency.
In her opinion, the continuous strikes in the transportation sector make us notice them more “because we feel their effects and that is why they may seem harsher to us.”
“On the other hand, strikes in the metallurgical industry, for example, do not directly affect ordinary citizens,” she says.
The DIW sees it the same way.
“The current train drivers' strike has given us the impression that Germany is only on strike.
But in a longer-term comparison, we can see that that is not the case at all, although of course infrastructure stoppages are special.
They are more noticeable.
Furthermore, when it comes to freight transport, these strikes have a negative impact on the industry,” DIW expert Theresa Bührle explained this week in a meeting with a small group of journalists.
“However, individual days of strikes do not usually have that much importance.
“Studies have shown that strikes only really become an obstacle to the transport of goods when they last three, four or more days,” she added.
“In that case, the costs can amount to hundreds of millions of euros per day.”
Strikes are a legitimate instrument for workers to pressure to achieve their demands, but in these cases the unions have raised the decibels with the aim of adding new members.
This is the case of the Verdi union.
The powerful union of workers in the service sector is the one behind the strikes of airport and public transport staff in cities, among others.
Last year alone it achieved 200,000 new members thanks to its collective bargaining strategy.
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