Missing buses and trains, canceled flights and closed doors in municipal kindergartens: In the past few months, people in Germany have felt the consequences of warning strikes on their own bodies with unusual frequency.
In an international comparison, employees in Germany are actually not particularly fond of going on strike. But that could change.
“We may see more strikes in Germany in the future,” said Thorsten Schulten, collective bargaining expert at the Economic and Social Sciences Institute of the dpa’s Hans Böckler Foundation, which is close to the union. “Work stoppages could lose the character of the extraordinary that they have until now and simply be part of collective bargaining,” he said.
The reasons are obvious to the expert: “We’re having a pretty tough wage round because we live in pretty tough times – with high price increases and the question of who ultimately bears the cost of inflation.” In addition, the employees felt that the labor market had changed in many areas due to the labor shortage and that the employees no longer had to put up with anything.
Unions “much more willing to deal with conflict”
The worker-related institute of the German economy also recently came to the conclusion in a study that the trade unions had become “significantly more conflict-friendly” again this year. “The collective bargaining negotiations will again be much more conflictual this year than in 2022, and this development is likely to continue over the course of the year – not least because of the real wage losses in the past three years,” said IW collective bargaining expert Hagen Lesch.
The fact is: According to the latest figures from the Federal Statistical Office, workers in Germany had to accept real wage losses of 4 percent last year alone due to high inflation.
However, Schulten and Lesch warned against overdramatizing the recent labor disputes. In a long-term comparison, the development is not dramatic, says IW expert Lesch. “In the first three months of this year, the intensity of the conflict was no higher than the long-term average.”
It only appears that way to people because this time the warning strikes affected important areas of public services such as local public transport, air transport, the railways and public services.
“All in all, by international comparison, Germany is still a relatively low-strike country with a comparatively restrictive right to strike,” says the balance sheet for industrial action for 2022 published by the WSI on Thursday.
2022 average strike year
According to this, there were 225 labor disputes last year, in which a total of 930,000 strikers took part. Arithmetically, 674,000 working days were lost as a result. This means that 2022 was a relatively average year for strikes, despite high inflation and the associated loss of real wages. According to the WSI, only about every sixth employee in Germany (17 percent) has personally experienced a strike.
In an international comparison, in which the days lost due to labor disputes per 1000 employees are compared, Germany is still in the middle with 18 days lost according to the WSI. For comparison: In Belgium, the WSI tariff experts counted 96 lost days per 1000 employees and in France 92.
“Germany will not be one of the countries with the most strikes in the future either,” WSI expert Schulten is convinced. “I don’t see that we get French conditions in Germany when it comes to strikes.”
Because the German tariff model still works. The labor disputes of the past few months have only just proven that. “Despite all the disputes, there hasn’t been an indefinite forced strike in any industry so far, but a collective bargaining compromise has been found.”
In any case, it is not automatic that the number of strikes will increase in the future, said Schulten. “It doesn’t have to be that way if employers understand that they have to accommodate employees in times of skills shortages.”
