WIf you book a train or plane ticket, you’re probably doing so with shaky fingers at the moment. What if there is a strike again? The German Locomotive Drivers’ Union (GDL) has been on strike on Deutsche Bahn’s passenger and freight transport for around 300 hours since November 2023 in the current collective bargaining round. There have been five warning strikes by German Lufthansa ground staff since the beginning of the year. The flight attendants of the core Lufthansa brand also stopped work to emphasize their demands in collective bargaining.
“In fact, the year 2023 was significantly more conflictual than previous years, and there were already intensive strikes in the first months of the new year,” says Sandra Vogel, collective bargaining researcher at the employer-related Institute of the German Economy (IW). However, if you look at the past two decades, 2015 was the peak year for strikes. Mainly due to the labor disputes at Deutsche Post and in the social and educational systems, more than 2 million working days were lost for more than 1.1 million strikers. How often strikes occur and how much the population notices depends largely on the industry. For 2022, the Economic and Social Sciences Institute (WSI) of the trade union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation identified 225 industrial disputes with 674,000 lost working days by 930,000 strikers.
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