2023-06-16 23:07:12
IIn the wage dispute at Deutsche Bahn, no conclusion was reached for the fifth day of negotiations in a row. The good news for travelers: In the coming days, at least the state-owned group is not threatened with warning strikes. DB and the railway and transport union EVG have agreed to continue their negotiations in the coming week. Both sides announced this on Friday evening in Berlin. Before that, the EVG wants to inform its decision-making bodies about the current status of negotiations. Outgoings were ruled out until the next round of talks with the DB representatives.
“We negotiated intensively and reached an agreement on many issues,” said DB HR Director Martin Seiler. EVG collective bargaining board member Kristian Loroch said: “We have worked out numerous compromise lines in the past few days and now want to discuss them in detail with the responsible decision-making bodies.”
What was last negotiated
In the last few hours of the negotiations, possible pay increases and the duration of the collective agreement are likely to have been the focus – the two most complicated issues. The union had already emphasized in an interim report on Wednesday that there was a lot of potential for conflict.
The EVG has so far largely paralyzed rail traffic twice in the collective bargaining round with warning strikes. A planned 50-hour strike in May was canceled at short notice after a legal dispute at the labor court in Frankfurt am Main.
What the EVG demands and the DB offers
The EVG wants to achieve a fixed salary increase of at least 650 euros per month or twelve percent more for the upper wage groups for a good 180,000 employees at Deutsche Bahn (DB). According to their ideas, the term should be twelve months.
Deutsche Bahn had recently promised twelve percent more in several stages for the lower wage groups over a period of 24 months. The middle groups should get a total of ten percent more and the upper groups eight percent. The first stage of the increase should therefore be due this year. In addition, there is an inflation compensation premium in several payments totaling 2850 euros, which is tax and duty-free.
Which topics were important during the week
After the end on Friday, both sides left open the points on which there were agreements and where differences still remained. Nothing was announced about the process and the mood.
On Wednesday, both sides announced in an interim report that at the beginning of the week they had spoken in detail about the bus companies of Deutsche Bahn, the freight transport subsidiary DB Cargo and the internal service providers of the state-owned group. For example, the EVG wants to abolish the regional differences in pay for the employees of the 18 bus companies.
Deutsche Bahn worries about the profitability and competitiveness of these companies with higher personnel costs. For example, DB Cargo made a loss before interest and taxes of 665 million euros in 2022.
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