Unions and employers have settled the collective bargaining dispute in the federal states’ public services. The leaders of Verdi and the civil service association dbb agreed with the collective bargaining association of German states (TdL) on wage increases, which, according to Verdi, amount to an average of eleven percent. This is spread over 25 months.
The employees should receive tax- and duty-free special payments totaling 3,000 euros, a base amount of 200 euros and then 5.5 percent more money. This corresponds to the conclusion for the federal and local public services from April.
The agreement will avert further strikes in the public sector. The unions had previously increased the pressure on the federal states: at the end of November, around 20,000 teachers and educators stopped work for a day, daycare centers had to close and classes were canceled. A similar campaign has previously taken place at university hospitals and other hospitals in the federal states. There were also strikes in other areas of the public service, such as administration and road maintenance. The latter led to for example in Schleswig-Holstein Some of the streets were no longer cleared despite snow and ice.
Verdi and the Civil Service Association, which conducted the negotiations on behalf of the union side, originally demanded 10.5 percent more income or at least 500 euros more per month. They argued with high inflation. Last year, consumer prices rose by 6.9 percent after the Russian attack on Ukraine, and around six percent is forecast for this year. In comparison, the last wage increase for the approximately two million employees and civil servants in the public sector was rather low at 2.8 percent.
In addition, the unions continue, the public service urgently needs to become more attractive, including through higher salaries. According to the Civil Service Association, around 360,000 positions cannot currently be filled. The employee representatives demanded a similarly high level of qualification for the states as for federal and local government employees, who had achieved wage increases of an average of around eleven percent in the spring.
Employers signaled that they were, in principle, prepared to raise wages. However, the states’ financial leeway is very narrow. “The budget situation is dramatic,” is how the negotiator and Hamburg Finance Senator Andreas Dressel (SPD) put it in the SZ interview. Federal government laws would require states to forego 40 billion euros in tax revenue over the next five years.
The states also fear consequences from the Federal Constitutional Court’s budget ruling, according to which the traffic light government is missing at least 60 billion euros. The federal government could limit donations to the states, said Dressel. In addition, the states would now have to check whether parts of their budgets were unconstitutional. In this situation, it is not possible to finance the unions’ demands, which would cost around 20 billion euros for the 850,000 employees, 1.2 million civil servants and 900,000 pensioners, said Dressel.
At the same time, however, before the third round of negotiations, which took place in Potsdam on Thursday, there were signals from both sides that they were ready for a compromise. In contrast to the railway, for example, where the fronts between the train drivers’ union GDL and the management have hardened and there is likely to be another long strike soon, no one in the public service seemed to be interested in continuing the dispute beyond the Christmas period.