The announcement of the nationwide strike in long-distance and regional transport of Deutsche Bahn with a lead time of less than 24 hours might have been legal.
It didn't come out of the blue either.
Precisely for this reason, the legislature as well as the federal government, as owners of the railway, have to be asked how long they want to stand by and watch that a small but striking union with around 25,000 members can repeatedly take the entire society hostage.
The federal government may have pursued lofty goals with the unified collective bargaining law drawn up in 2015 under the then Federal Labor Minister Nahles.
It also had to react because the labor courts had thrown their established case law overboard a few years earlier.
But in a public service company like Deutsche Bahn, the legal framework for collective bargaining has definitely proven to be unsuitable.
The customers of Deutsche Bahn have long known how to tell.
Obviously, it has not yet reached the owners.
The parties remain silent about this in their election programs, above all the CSU, which has been the Federal Minister of Transport since 2009.
After all, commuters and other regular train drivers could object that many trains were canceled on Wednesday with an announcement.
Deutsche Bahn is able to achieve similar “poor performance” day in and day out without a striking train driver.
Because despite all the contradicting assurances of various board members, traveling by train in Germany has become a daily Vabanque game.
Anyone planning to arrive without a buffer of at least one hour between their planned arrival and an appointment should familiarize themselves with terms such as "technical fault on the train", "signal fault" or "switch fault" as a precaution.
These “disruptions in operations” are the responsibility of others than the head of the trade union, Weselsky.