As of: February 15, 2024, 11:24 a.m
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“Warning strike!” is written on a sign.
© Friso Gentsch/dpa/Symbolbild
Almost two weeks after the first action, another warning strike in North Rhine-Westphalia is bringing local public transport to a largely standstill.
Millions of passengers are affected.
Düsseldorf - In North Rhine-Westphalia, trams and subways will remain in the depots this Thursday due to a warning strike in around 30 municipal transport companies.
Only a small part of the public buses run in the strike regions, which are already operated by private subcontractors.
The Verdi union has called for the all-day work stoppages.
She wants to increase the pressure on employers in collective bargaining over working conditions shortly before the second round of negotiations this Friday.
The warning strike began as planned with the start of the shift usually between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., Peter Büddicker from the Verdi regional district of North Rhine-Westphalia told dpa on Thursday morning.
According to initial findings, strike participation is high again.
“The strike is going on everywhere,” explained Büddicker.
In the affected transport companies, where a night shift starts on Thursday evening, there will still be a strike.
Verdi NRW assumes that traffic will be back to normal on Friday morning.
The affected municipal transport companies will provide information about which bus routes in the respective city or region can still be served on the day of the strike.
They also point out that rail traffic on the RE, RB and S-Bahn lines is not affected by the warning strike.
Almost all major NRW local transport companies such as KVB (Cologne), Rheinbahn (Düsseldorf), DSW21 (Dortmund) and the Münster municipal utility are on strike.
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) are also not on strike.
In view of the all-day warning strike by the numerous municipal transport companies in the most populous federal state, millions of people had to look for an alternative for getting to work or school on Thursday.
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 there are often round trips, there could be around 2.5 million people affected.
Experience has shown that many employees work from home on such days.
Despite the warning strike, school attendance is compulsory.
The background to the warning strike is the collective negotiations that began in January about working conditions in the municipal transport companies.
The employers' association KAV NRW considers the renewed warning strike after only a first round of negotiations to be incomprehensible.
At the beginning of February, Verdi NRW started an all-day warning strike at most municipal transport companies in NRW.
Verdi NRW justified the renewed all-day warning strike, among other things, by saying that the employers had put forward counter-demands in the collective bargaining negotiations.
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 increased 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