Franconian Beer Message Board
Update |
| Posted by Nick B. on 2007-11-22 01:21:08 |
| And clarifications. First off, I hope I didn't come across as anti-union or anything with my "what's the big deal?" comment. It sounds to me that the DB engineers are grossly underpaid, especially considering how well the German train network operates, and how important it is to the economy. And as to the more heavily unionized eastern former DDR/GDR states, this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their having been communist, but because train engineers of a certain level of experience were made civil servants (Beamter) back in the days of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the state-run railroad in the former west. A Beamter is not in a union (I think?), so one can't strike. I guess (don't know) that the same was not true of engineers in the old Deutsche Reichsbahn, the state-run railroad of the former east. As the two organisations merged and became the partially-privatised Die Bahn, the engineers in the west who were already made civil servants (*) remained civil servants, and apparently no other engineers have been made civil servants since then. (* One nice thing about Deutsch, they have a word for this: verbeamtete Lokführer--engineers who've been made civil servants. Word conservation.) The tv news this morning claims that DB have presented a new offer to the union, who will now mull it over and decide by Monday if it's good enough to bring them back to further negotiations. Rumo(u)r has it that the offer is in the range of 10-15%. No strikes will occur until during this mull-it-over period. So Uncle Jimbo should be safe, at least. |