Collective bargaining with the Verdi union has failed.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf Collective bargaining for around 160,000 employees at Deutsche Post has failed. The third round of collective bargaining between Deutsche Post and the Verdi union ended on Friday after three days of negotiations without an agreement. The Verdi trade union then declared the negotiations to have failed and announced a strike ballot on a labor dispute.
Verdi negotiator Andrea Kocsis said: “The offer presented by the employers is far from our demands. The employers were not willing to compensate for the employees’ real wage losses.” The employers’ proposal even increases the risk of further real wage losses.
According to its own statements, the Post had offered an increase in all wages and training allowances by a total of 340 euros per month in two stages from the beginning of 2024. This means wage increases of up to 20.3 percent. In addition, all employees and trainees should receive the full tax-free inflation compensation premium of 3,000 euros retrospectively from January 1, 2023 over two years.
“Verdi has lost a historic opportunity to secure the future of Deutsche Post in Germany. With this offer, we have gone to the limits of what is financially feasible in order to give particular support to those of our employees who have felt the challenges of the past few months most severely,” said Thomas Ogilvie, Group Board Member for Human Resources and Labor Director at Deutsche Post AG.
Verdi is demanding 15 percent more wages and salaries for postal workers, citing high inflation as the reason for this. At Deutsche Post AG, almost 90 percent of the employees are in pay groups 1 to 3, whose basic monthly salary is between 2108 and 3090 euros gross. These employees simply could not afford a loss of purchasing power, said Verdi negotiator Kocsis.
The union had called on workers to go on warning strikes several times in recent weeks. According to Verdi, around 23,000 postal workers took part in work stoppages this week alone. In total, almost 100,000 employees temporarily stopped working during the collective bargaining process. According to Swiss Post, millions of letters and parcels were delayed when they reached their recipients.
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