Status: 03/03/2023 2:46 p.m
In many places, employees in local public transport have responded to ver.di’s call to stop working. Buses and trains stood still in several federal states – from Stuttgart to Hanover. The situation at a glance.
There has been a massive strike in local public transport in several federal states since the early morning. Impairments to buses and trains were reported from a total of seven federal states. Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Saxony, Lower Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate are affected.
The service trade union ver.di and the civil servants’ association dbb have called for all-day warning strikes in six of the seven federal states. In doing so, they want to underpin their demands in the current collective bargaining round for the public sector in the municipalities and the federal government. The Deutsche Bahn with its S-Bahn and private transport companies are not affected.
In the affected federal states and cities, the sometimes massive effects of the warning strikes have been gradually appearing since the morning. Apart from the ver.di wage negotiations, there is also a strike in Bavaria. An overview of the situation in the affected federal states.
Collective bargaining dispute in the public sector leads to warning strikes in local public transport in six federal states
Carolyn Wißing, WDR, daily news 12:00 p.m., March 3, 2023
Hesse
In Frankfurt, the subways and trams have remained in the depots, Thomas Heimbürger from the ver.di union told the dpa news agency. All subways and trams there are expected to stand still for 24 hours without replacement. Hardly any buses and trains ran in Wiesbaden and Kassel either.
North Rhine-Westphalia
In North Rhine-Westphalia ver.di expects at least 15,000 strikers nationwide. Residents of the larger cities in particular must be prepared for considerable restrictions. The focus this time is on the Ruhr area and the Rhineland. In Düsseldorf, for example, all subways, trams and school buses were eliminated. In addition to Düsseldorf, ver.di also called for strikes in Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Mülheim, Oberhausen, Cologne, Bonn, Aachen, Münster, Bielefeld and Hagen.
It might be noisy because of the strikes WDR problems will also arise in the run-up to the Bundesliga game between Borussia Dortmund and RB Leipzig tomorrow evening. Traffic chaos is expected.
Baden-Wuerttemberg
Numerous buses and trains are also at a standstill in several cities in Baden-Württemberg. Work stoppages occurred in, among other places, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Heilbronn, Karlsruhe and Baden-Baden. In some of the affected cities, replacement buses are being used by private companies. In Karlsruhe came loud SWR For the first time, the entire public transport system came to a standstill because, in addition to the transport company, the Albtal transport company also went on strike out of solidarity. According to ver.di, a total of 5,000 employees stopped working.
Markus Pfalzgraf, SWR, on the warning strikes in local transport
tagesschau24 10:00 a.m., March 3, 2023
Saxony
Local transport workers are also on strike in some Saxon cities. In Leipzig, the regular tram and bus services were discontinued, as announced by the Leipzig Transport Authority (LVB). According to a spokesman, the vehicles of the Dresden public transport company were also standing still. Only a few buses operated by subcontractors are on the road. It was also called in Chemnitz and Zwickau.
Lower Saxony and Bremen
In large parts of Lower Saxony there are strikes in local transport and in public service. “The buses and trams didn’t even go on the road or rail when they started operating,” said Detlef Ahting, head of the ver.di district of Lower Saxony/Bremen. Smaller transport companies and public companies are on strike – for example in Hanover, Braunschweig, Bremen or Göttingen. In some other cities like Osnabrück or Oldenburg, however, most buses drove. In Lower Saxony there were already severe restrictions on local public transport on Thursday.
Rhineland-Palatinate
In Rhineland-Palatinate, for example, buses and trams remained in the depots in the state capital Mainz, as Marko Bärschneider from the ver.di union said. The warning strike began between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. when the individual companies started operating. Local transport was also restricted in other cities such as Kaiserslautern, Wiesbaden and Trier. Buses are particularly affected here: while a few lines were still running in Trier, almost all city buses in Kaiserslautern were canceled.
Bayern
In Bavaria – detached from the collective bargaining of the transport companies in other federal states – there is also a strike. The Munich transport company has reported massive restrictions for the second day in a row. The subway and tram were out of service, but the S-Bahn was running.
There is limited bus service in several Bavarian cities.
The AVV in Augsburg reported that local transport in the city had almost come to a complete standstill. The transport association Greater Nuremberg (VGN) was affected in several cities, but not the regional train service and the S-Bahn. There were restrictions and failures in Nuremberg, Bamberg, Erlangen, Fürth and Regensburg, among others.
Fridays for Future is also on strike
The action takes place together with the climate activists from Fridays for Future, who called for protests for more climate protection today.
Many citizens have been feeling the effects of warning strikes in the public sector for weeks. In the negotiations for the approximately 2.5 million employees in the federal and local public services, the trade union ver.di and the civil servants’ association dbb are demanding 10.5 percent more salary in view of inflation, the energy crisis and a shortage of staff, but at least 500 euros more per month. A spokeswoman for ver.di emphasized that better pay should create more attractive jobs and counteract the shortage of skilled workers in the public sector so that employees do not leave the company tagesschau.de.
No agreement was reached in the second round of negotiations last week. The unions had rejected an offer from the employers as insufficient. The offer includes, among other things, a pay increase of five percent in two steps and one-off payments totaling 2,500 euros.
