As of: February 15, 2024, 2:02 p.m
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“Warning strike!” is written on a sign.
© Friso Gentsch/dpa/Symbolbild
Another warning strike largely paralyzed local public transport in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The collective bargaining parties will sit down at the table again on Friday.
The positions are far apart.
Düsseldorf - After the second day of warning strike in public transport in North Rhine-Westphalia in just under two weeks, the collective bargaining parties are continuing their negotiations about working conditions in the municipal transport companies.
The Verdi union is calling for an offer from employers for the second round of negotiations this Friday.
“We naturally expect, due to the pressure we have put on today, that the employers will submit an offer and clearly move away from their positions,” Verdi NRW local transport expert Peter Büddicker told the dpa on Thursday.
He had made it clear that the positions were still miles apart.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, local transport with trams, subways and buses largely came to a standstill in around 30 municipal transport companies on Thursday following a warning strike by Verdi.
Only a small proportion of the public buses were able to operate in the strike regions, which are already operated by private subcontractors.
According to the union, the warning strike began as planned with the start of the shift usually between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.
In the affected municipal transport companies, which had a night shift on Thursday evening, there was still to be a strike.
However, Verdi NRW assumed that traffic would be back to normal on Friday morning.
Almost all major NRW local transport companies such as KVB (Cologne), Rheinbahn (Düsseldorf), DSW21 (Dortmund) and Stadtwerke Münster went on strike on Thursday.
An exception is the Aachen transport company ASEAG, whose buses run in Aachen and the city region and for which an in-house collective agreement applies.
But RVK (Cologne), RSVG (Troisdorf), OVAG (Gummersbach) and the WVG group (Münster) were also not on strike.
In view of the all-day warning strike, millions of people in the most populous federal state had to look for an alternative for getting to work or school.
According to estimates by the Association of German Transport Companies, municipal transport companies in North Rhine-Westphalia transport an average of around five million passengers per day.
Since these are mostly return trips, there could be around 2.5 million people affected.
As the ADAC North Rhine explained, more workers apparently used the car on Thursday morning than on strike days in recent weeks and months.
In any case, Thursday is the day of the week with the most traffic jams in North Rhine-Westphalia, said an ADAC spokesman.
According to the NRW Ministry of Transport's traffic jam overview, drivers in Düsseldorf and Cologne had to accept delays of 10, 15 or 20 minutes on many roads in the morning, which then added up on routes across the city.
According to the online overview from the NRW Ministry of Transport, there were also traffic jams with significant delays in Bonn.
Collective bargaining on working conditions in municipal transport companies, which are anchored in the so-called collective agreement, began in January with a first round of negotiations.
The employers' association KAV NRW criticized the fact that a new warning strike after only a first round of negotiations was incomprehensible.
At the beginning of February, Verdi NRW started an all-day warning strike at most municipal transport companies in NRW.
Verdi NRW also justified the renewed action by saying that the employers had made counter demands.
The union is particularly demanding additional days off.
The aim is to relieve employees and make jobs in local public transport more attractive.
“What is really missing are young applicants,” said Verdi NRW local transport expert Büddicker.
The employers point out, among other things, that salaries for employees in local public transport in North Rhine-Westphalia will increase significantly on March 1st, as already agreed.
The scope for negotiation for further demands is therefore very limited.
From the employer's perspective, additional days off would mean that existing drivers would be placed under greater strain given the existing driver shortage.
dpa