Stuttgart/Baden-Baden (dpa/lsw) – Because of a day-long warning strike, numerous buses and trains in more than half a dozen cities in Baden-Württemberg have been standing still since early Friday morning. If you want to use public transport to get to work or school, you have to consider an alternative in Stuttgart, Freiburg, Mannheim and Heilbronn, in Ulm, Esslingen, Constance, Baden-Baden and Karlsruhe. In these cities, employees of local public transport companies are being asked to stop working. Jan Bleckert from the Verdi Baden-Württemberg trade union confirmed the start of the warning strikes on Friday morning.
In Stuttgart, the S-Bahn runs despite the strike. They are served by Deutsche Bahn. In Karlsruhe, for the first time in the history of the Karlsruher Verkehrsverbund, the Albtalverkehrsgesellschaft AVG (solidarity strike) and the Verkehrsbetriebe Karlsruhe VBK have been jointly called to industrial action.
The background to the protest is the collective bargaining conflict in the federal and local public services. The union expects that there will be no public transport in the affected cities on Friday. There are similar calls in five other federal states.
The employers had submitted an offer in the second round of nationwide negotiations in Potsdam last week. The unions immediately rejected it. The offer includes, among other things, a pay increase of five percent in two steps and one-off payments totaling 2,500 euros. Verdi and the civil servants’ association dbb are demanding 10.5 percent more income, but at least 500 euros more per month. The employer side had rejected the demands as “unaffordable”.
