Oh, says Bernhard Stiedl on the phone, “what does a dream job mean?” Just over a week ago, the native of Lower Bavaria was promoted, if you will: to chairman of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) in Bavaria – and thus to the top comrade in the Free State. The umbrella organization represents eight trade unions and almost 800,000 members. “I was a trade unionist before,” says Stiedl, but the new job naturally appeals to him, “there are many more issues.”
There are enough challenges waiting for Stiedl in his new old dream job: on the one hand, the three huge ones called digitization, climate change, pandemic; on the other hand, many big ones, such as the situation in care or the consequences of demographic change. Stiedl succeeds Matthias Jena, who died in the summer. This was preceded by a vote at the district conference in Würzburg. On the one hand there was the IG Metall man Stiedl, on the other Verdi representative Dominik Schirmer, for whom the district board had spoken out. Stiedl won by 61 votes to 37. Bavaria’s chief metaller Johann Horn promptly praised him as a “passionate trade unionist”.
In this sense, Stiedl’s CV – SPD member, trained precision mechanic, studied business administration – reads as a classic career. Born in Deggendorf in 1970, in 1988 he became chairman of the youth and trainee representation at the electronics group Rohde & Schwarz and later became a works council member there. In 1997 he was hired as a union secretary at the IG Metall branch in Ingolstadt, where he was promoted to first representative in 2018. At Audi he sits on the supervisory board. Despite the many years in Upper Bavaria, he has retained his Lower Bavarian accent.
In Ingolstadt, Stiedl repeatedly drew attention to the basic trade union virtues of disputes and strikes. He warned that car companies should be more open to new business models such as car sharing. And when the Audi workforce went on warning strike in March 2021, he announced that he would “up the ante”. The trade unions themselves are under pressure, for example IG Metall recently complained about the dwindling number of members. The world of work is fragmenting, new jobs are being created outside of old structures, sometimes under precarious conditions. That’s exactly why, says Stiedl, trade unions are more necessary than ever: In the future, there will have to be more than collective bargaining issues. In the past, one could afford a house with one salary, but today it takes two earners to pay the rent. “We work to live. Is that really how we imagine life to be?”
The new post also offers an opportunity to argue. Last week, Verdi announced a lawsuit against the general decree of the regional councils, according to which employees may be obliged to work longer hours in order to compensate for staff shortages by Omikron. Shifts of up to twelve hours are therefore possible in critical infrastructure, for example in waste disposal or in the health sector. Stiedl considers this requirement of the state government to be wrong: instead of considering a strategy against the general shortage of staff, people who are particularly affected by the pandemic are burdened. Otherwise, Prime Minister Markus Söder could do more to accompany the change in society and the world of work. Bavaria is the only federal state that does not have a further training law that guarantees employees qualification measures. “I will measure Mr. Söder by his actions, not his words.”
But the new old dream job also brings with it a problem: whoever is at the head of an association and the dispute has to make sure that it doesn’t end up being eaten up by it. Stiedl’s solution is: get out into nature, hike with your daughter, have a picnic. “I hope there is no cell phone reception there.”