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Warning strike in Hamburg (photo from June 9)
Photo: Markus Scholz / dpa
In the collective bargaining dispute over the wages of port workers, the Ver.di trade union has called for a 24-hour warning strike in German seaports on Thursday.
The union said the locations in Hamburg, Emden, Bremerhaven, Bremen, Brake and Wilhelmshaven were affected.
»The offer made by the employers in the fourth round of negotiations is totally inadequate;
it has not brought any substantial improvement to the previous offer, but turned out to be a classic deceptive package," said Ver.di negotiator Maya Schwiegershausen-Güth.
Many ships on the way to Europe
Even before the third round of negotiations, port workers had largely paralyzed ship handling for the first time in decades during a warning strike for several hours.
For the port operators, the strikes have come at an unfavorable time, as there are already massive delays in German ports.
Many terminals can hardly cope with the rush because container slots are scarce.
At the same time, the lockdown in China with port closures messed up the shipping companies' schedules.
The supply chain problems for many companies in Germany had increased massively due to the traffic jam in front of Shanghai.
According to an analysis by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), around a dozen container ships with a freight capacity of 150,000 standard containers were in the queue off Hamburg and Bremerhaven at the beginning of the month.
Industry experts expect the situation on the North Sea coast to get even worse in the coming weeks, as many ships are on their way to Europe after the end of the lockdowns in China.
mic/dpa
