German Public Workers Union Fights To Get 6.3% Pay Rise

BERLIN: Some 2 million German public-sector employees are to get a pay rise totaling 6.3 percent over two years, employers and a union said Saturday after marathon talks that followed disruptive walkouts in recent weeks.

The hard-fought agreement banishes the ver.di union's threat to ballot members on an all-out strike campaign had a deal not been reached. “We have agreed to raise public service wages by 6.3 percent over 24 months, in three stages,” Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich the chief government negotiator announced after talks in Potsdam, outside Berlin, that overran by more than a day.

That is well short of ver.di's original demand of a 6.5 percent raise this year alone for federal and municipal employees as diverse as garbage collectors, teachers and civil-service administrators. But it is much higher than the 3.3 percent over two years that employers originally offered. Ver.di (German Public Workers Union) rejected that, arguing that it wouldn't even keep up with the pace of inflation currently running at an annual rate of just over 2 percent in Germany.

The union stepped up a campaign of limited warning strikes to raise the pressure ahead of talks that started Wednesday. On Tuesday, walkouts resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations at German airports. The deal involves an initial 3.5 percent raise backdated to March 1, followed by further increases of 1.4 percent each on Jan. 1 and Aug. 1 next year.

Ver.di argued that public-sector workers deserve a significant increase after showing relative restraint in recent years, and after two years of strong economic growth.

FRANCIS TAWIAH (Duisburg - Germany)