A lot of people dream of traveling around the world. Just get out, or rather get in. Let go, start, drive off. Mentally, the world traveler is then already in the vastness of the Atacama Desert, on the beaches of Croatia, high above the fjords of Norway or on the ferry somewhere. The main thing is far away. But there’s a catch: Anyone who gets into a car or mobile home usually gets stuck at the next construction site – and stands still. On the A 99 near Kirchheim, the Ottostraße in Ottobrunn, on the Südliche Ingolstädter Straße in Unterschleißheim. Traveling could be so easy if it wasn’t for traffic.
But now many make the mistake and curse those of all people who build new roads for all of us, mend old ones, repair bridges and otherwise keep the entire infrastructure of this country running: the construction workers. And just as a note: construction workers do not live on construction sites, they also have to get there somehow and often travel long distances to do so. In fact, so many that the result is more orbits than a single person could ever complete. Experts from the Pestel Institute, a research facility for local authorities, have calculated that the slightly more than 3,200 construction workers in the district of Munich cover 62.3 million “construction site kilometers” each year, an average of 44 kilometers for a one-way trip.
And that, so the irony of the construction site, often in traffic jams, annoyed – and so far without any corresponding financial compensation. More than 1,500 circumnavigations of the earth are achieved in this way – and the construction workers have not yet been paid for them, or as the industrial union Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt (IG Bau) says: “Most construction workers have simply given the boss their time for trips to the construction site .”
That’s enough of that. The “real time waster”, as trade unionist Carsten Burckhardt says, i.e. the journey to work, is finally being paid for. The construction workers get between six and eight euros a day, and those who drive their own car instead of the Baubulli continue to receive mileage allowance. And those who take the bus or train will also receive compensation in the future. At least that. A dream will certainly not come true – but it’s always fair.