Liars, rivets in pinstripes, bullshit – when Claus Weselsky deals against bosses, the hearts of long-established leftists should swell. The 64-year-old union boss’s tirades are mostly directed against the management of Deutsche Bahn: while “those up there” filled their pockets despite poor performance, train drivers and train attendants fell by the wayside, is his criticism.
The chairman of the German Locomotive Drivers’ Union (GDL) is currently fighting with the federally owned company over higher tariffs and fewer working hours for employees. It is the last collective bargaining dispute before his planned retirement.
In front of the cameras, Weselsky relies on the rowdy appearance again. Concentrated, experienced and with a serious expression, he then denounces the employers’ lack of insight. He should have in mind what words his members in particular want to hear. “Hated in business and social media, but Claus Weselsky is still there,” satirist Jan Böhmermann recently sang about Weselsky, who has led the GDL mostly unchallenged since May 2008.
Chairman’s one-man show
Because the GDL is above all a one-man show for the chairman. Everything is tailored to Weselsky; he is usually the only one who speaks into the microphones and cameras. His two deputies, Mario Reiß and Lars Jedinat, usually stand to his right and left and look grim while their boss complains into the microphones. The three white men in their suits and always with ties might seem a bit old-fashioned, especially to younger people.
Weselsky is certainly not one of the more popular people in the Federal Republic, quite the opposite. Collective bargaining conflicts with him at the top of the GDL have recently always meant anger and frustration among rail passengers. A few years ago, the union leader even needed police protection because a media outlet had published his private address. To this day, he remains friends with the police unionist Rainer Wendt, who supported him at the time.
But the GDL members trust his negotiating skills. “Clausi-Mausi” will do it, some of them said in the summer when the union set out its demands for the collective bargaining round with the railway. And “Clausi-Mausi” got started: just five days after the first round of negotiations with the railways, he called for the first warning strike. After the second round, he declared the entire negotiations to have failed and initiated a ballot. The first multi-day strike is now underway.
He also shows humor sometimes
Despite all the labor struggles, Weselsky is only partially suitable as a left-wing pop star for the working class. Simply because, as a trade unionist, he is a CDU member. “Because it comes closest to my basic conservative stance,” he explained in a recent interview. Away from the cameras, he can also be less rowdy. He then appears approachable, friendly and even humorous.
Weselsky can talk for hours about past collective bargaining rounds, about his experiences with the press and also about the holiday apartment in the Spreewald, where the trade unionist plans to retire soon. It is his last round of collective bargaining. Next year he plans to step down from the chairmanship and retire. Weselsky’s successor Reiß will probably have a difficult time.
During his long term in office, Weselsky, who was born in Dresden, always had a great credibility advantage, which many members appreciate: He was a train driver himself for years, driving freight trains and also passenger transport across the country. The Reichsbahn trained the Saxon in the 1970s, first as a fitter and then as a train driver. Weselsky worked in the profession until 1992, most recently as a personnel dispatcher and locomotive manager in Pirna. He has been with the GDL since 1990 and has been working full-time for the union since 1992.
Tough competition for EVG
As chairman, he regularly tried to expand the organizational scope of the small union and to negotiate collective agreements for areas of the company where the GDL did not previously have such agreements. To this day, the GDL is in tough competition with the Railway and Transport Union (EVG), which has many more members and is significantly more strongly represented in the DB Group. While the EVG was repeatedly ridiculed as a tame house union, Weselsky was the tough opponent to the “red giant”, as he likes to call the railway. Internally, critics repeatedly accused him of making “lonely decisions”.
In view of the early warning strikes and the failure of negotiations, Weselsky was often asked whether he wanted to know again before he retired and therefore escalate the collective bargaining dispute regardless of the substantive progress. The GDL boss always rejected this. In fact, the current round of collective bargaining does not differ in its severity from the many others that Weselsky has led in his long career. The conflict lasted around a year in 2015 alone. Seen in this way, Weselsky is just getting started.
