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Bus depot of the Cologne public transport company on strike: In many places nothing works anymore
Photo: Oliver Berg/dpa
Ver.di is extending the strike in local public transport as planned.
Employees in several federal states stopped work on Thursday morning.
The action is part of an almost nationwide wave of warning strikes by the union.
March 1st is the main strike day nationwide.
On that day, the union also wants to take to the streets with Fridays for Future.
A number of demonstrations against the climate crisis are planned.
Bavaria
is not affected by the strike
; the collective agreement there has not been terminated.
There is no longer any threat of strikes in
Saarland
since a collective agreement was reached on Wednesday.
In
North Rhine-Westphalia,
a two-day warning strike began in most local public transport companies this morning.
Employees from around 30 municipal transport companies in the state are called upon to do this for around 48 hours.
Employee participation was high, said a union spokesman.
Due to the warning strike, no trams or subways are expected to run, and only a few buses are likely to be on the road.
The Aachen transport company ASEAG, for which an in-house collective agreement applies, is not on strike.
In the past few weeks there have been several warning strikes in local public transport in individual federal states.
On February 2nd, Ver.di went on strike on local public transport in almost all federal states in a nationwide coordinated action.
At that time, according to union information, up to 130 companies in more than 80 cities and around 40 rural districts were affected.
A two-day warning strike also started in
Lower Saxony
on Thursday morning.
Many buses and trams across the state have been at a standstill since 3 a.m.
Passengers must expect significant disruption.
The Üstra in Hanover and the Braunschweiger Verkehrsgesellschaft are leaving all light rail and buses in the depots, Metrobus Osnabrück and Stadtbus Goslar are suspending bus operations, and in Wolfsburg more than 80 percent of all buses are canceled.
The buses are also still standing still in Göttingen.
A strike rally is planned in Osnabrück this morning.
There have been almost no buses, trams and subways
in
Berlin since early Thursday morning.
The strike started as planned when operations began, said Berlin Ver.di negotiator Gordon Günther.
The warning strike is scheduled to last until Friday at 2 p.m.
Passengers have to prepare for the cancellation of almost all local transport in the capital.
The S-Bahn and Ringbahn are not affected.
The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) criticized the strike as “completely unnecessary.”
At around 9 a.m. strikers want to gather for a rally in front of the BVG headquarters.
In
Hamburg,
on the other hand, subways and buses are to be idle for two full days.
Here too, collective bargaining at the municipal transport companies Hochbahn and VHH is stalling.
The Hochbahn operates the subway and the majority of bus routes in Hamburg, while the Hamburg-Holstein Transport Authority (VHH) mainly operates bus routes in the Schleswig-Holstein area surrounding the Hanseatic city.
The S-Bahn is not affected by the strike.
In
Schleswig-Holstein,
drivers of private bus companies are already on strike.
From Friday morning, the municipal transport companies in Kiel, Neumünster, Lübeck and Flensburg will also be on strike.
Passengers on local public transport in
Baden-Württemberg
will also face significant restrictions for two days, for example in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Heilbronn, Freiburg, Baden-Baden, Esslingen and Konstanz, as the union announced.
In
Saxony-Anhalt,
the municipal transport companies in Dessau-Roßlau, Halle and Magdeburg as well as in the Burgenland district are affected.
In
Rhineland-Palatinate,
the KRN Rhein-Nahe municipal transport and the transport companies in Mainz, Pirmasens, Kaiserslautern and Trier will be on strike on Thursday and Friday.
In
Bremen
and
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,
the union has called for another strike on Friday, and in
Hesse
there will be strikes on Friday and Saturday.
In
Brandenburg
there have been restrictions since Wednesday due to a walkout by employees of the Uckermärkische Verkehrsgesellschaft, and on Thursday employees of the Ostprignitz-Ruppiner local transport company also wanted to stop work.
The municipal transport companies in Potsdam and Cottbus, among others, are to be added on Friday.
The announced warning strike in local transport is just the latest in a series of strikes this winter.
There were, among other things, two labor disputes lasting several days at Deutsche Bahn and, most recently, several work stoppages in air traffic.
At Deutsche Bahn, the goal is to reach a collective agreement with the train drivers' union GDL in the coming week.
The peace obligation finally expires on March 3rd.
If there is no agreement by then, new labor disputes are also possible there.
The increased number of strikes has recently sparked an intensive debate about possible restrictions on the right to strike.
After employers in
Saxony
canceled collective bargaining negotiations in local transport, the union is expanding warning strikes here too.
The union announced that employees of local public transport companies in the Free State were called on to go on an all-day warning strike on Friday and that in Leipzig and Dresden the strike would be extended to Saturday.
Thuringia
is also affected
, where a two-day warning strike will continue on Thursday.
There is to be a central strike demonstration in Erfurt, to which several hundred participants as well as Thuringia's Infrastructure Minister Susanna Karawanskij (Left) are expected.
With the bus and train strike, Ver.di wants to increase the pressure on employers.
The union's main concern is to improve working conditions for employees.
Ver.di demands, among other things, shorter working hours without financial losses, longer rest periods between individual shifts, more vacation days or more vacation pay.
The background is the increased burden on employees and the staff shortage in local transport.
In fact, bus drivers are particularly difficult to find.
Higher wages and salaries are also being negotiated in Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.
apr/dpa