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A poster saying “STREIK” is stuck on a train in the Ruhrbahn depot in Essen.
© Fabian Strauch/dpa
Millions of people in North Rhine-Westphalia have to find an alternative way to get to work or school again.
Verdi has started a two-day warning strike in local public transport.
Düsseldorf - In North Rhine-Westphalia, trams and subways have remained in depots in many places since early Thursday morning due to a two-day warning strike in around 30 municipal transport companies.
Experience has shown that only a small proportion of public buses run in the strike regions and are operated by private subcontractors.
The Verdi NRW union has called for the work stoppages.
The two-day warning strike began as planned with the start of the shift usually between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., said Dennis Kurz from the Verdi Ruhr-West district, Dirk Seibel from the Düssel-Rhein-Wupper district and Verdi union secretary Frank-Michael Munkler for the Aachen areas -Düren-Erft and Cologne-Bonn-Leverkusen of the German Press Agency early Thursday morning.
Employee participation in the strike was once again high.
The trams and subways don't run.
According to Kurz, around 1,300 employees at the Ruhrbahn and the Oberhausen municipal utilities laid off their jobs.
Almost all large municipal local transport companies in North Rhine-Westphalia such as KVB (Cologne), Rheinbahn (Düsseldorf), DSW21 (Dortmund), the municipal utilities of Münster and moBiel (Bielefeld) are on strike again.
However, this time Verdi has called on employees to stop work for around 48 hours on Thursday and Friday.
The warning strike ends on Friday evening or Saturday night at the end of the shift.
At the beginning and mid-February, local public transport in the most populous federal state was largely paralyzed by two one-day warning strikes.
As with the previous warning strikes, a major exception is the Aachen transport company ASEAG, which has an in-house collective agreement.
Some other companies did not go on strike either.
The affected municipal transport companies provide information about the effects on the Internet and in their apps.
They also point out that rail traffic on the RE, RB and S-Bahn lines is not affected by the warning strike.
Millions of people have to find an alternative way to get to work or school on Thursday and Friday.
The background to the renewed warning strikes in North Rhine-Westphalia is collective bargaining over the working conditions of employees in municipal transport companies.
Two rounds of negotiations on the so-called collective collective agreement have so far produced no results.
The third round of negotiations is scheduled for March 11th and 12th.
Among other things, Verdi is calling for additional days off to relieve the burden on employees and make the jobs more attractive.
There is a dramatic labor shortage.
Buses and trains were canceled every day in all tariff areas because there were not enough staff.
Verdi has started a wave of warning strikes in local transport almost nationwide.
In the collective bargaining dispute at the state level, the employers' association KAV NRW pointed out that there is narrow financial scope and that salaries will rise significantly on March 1st, as agreed a long time ago.
Given the shortage of drivers, additional days off would mean that the remaining drivers would be put under more strain.
The association was optimistic that it would be able to agree on an “overall package” in the third round of collective bargaining.
dpa