Before an ultimatum expires, will there be an agreement on a collective bargaining agreement in the privatized university hospital in Marburg and Gießen? Employees make it clear that the current working conditions are not acceptable from their point of view.
Gießen/Marburg (dpa/lhe) – Before the second round of talks about a collective agreement for the relief, the employees of the university hospitals in Gießen and Marburg have expanded their protests. According to Verdi union secretary Fabian Dzewas-Rehm, around 800 non-medical employees at the clinic took part in day-long walkouts on Tuesday. They want to use this to underpin their demands for the talks this Thursday (March 9). The clinic management had already criticized the actions the day before.
During the talks, the union wants to achieve, among other things, that a minimum shift work is stipulated for the more than 7,000 non-medical employees in the individual areas of the clinic. If this is undershot, there should be stress points that can be converted into free time, as Dzewas-Rehm explained. A similar arrangement was recently agreed for the University Hospital in Frankfurt. A basic framework for the demands was already included in the first round of talks on February 16, and this Thursday concrete demands tailored to the individual areas are to be presented.
According to Verdi, more than 4,000 UKGM employees signed a 100-day ultimatum to their employer in December 2022, which expires on March 24. Accordingly, the workers agreed to strike for their demands as a last resort if there were no improvements after the ultimatum expired. The working conditions are currently “unacceptable,” said an employee of the neurosurgical pediatrics department on Tuesday at a press conference in Giessen. “If nothing happens now, we are ready to reduce the number of beds and go on strike.” Dzewas-Rehm added that the employees did not want to go on strike, they wanted to take good care of the patients. They are counting on an agreement by March 24, the employer is “responsible for what happens afterwards”.
The chief negotiator for the employers and UKGM CEO Gunther Weiß had criticized the warning strikes as well as the ultimatum. Achieving a viable conclusion within a few days of presenting the specific demands “represents an enormous challenge that is almost impossible to implement,” said Weiß.
