Workers need their own committees, independent of the corrupt unions, to defend life, health and jobs.
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The collective agreement in the social and educational service is an additional agreement to the TVöD, which does not expire until December 2022 and, with a wage “increase” of 1.8 percent this year, means an effective reduction in real wages. Inflation has already risen to 7.4 percent in April, not to mention the rise in petrol, energy and food prices.
The negotiations had been moved from Potsdam to Berlin on Tuesday evening. The degree obtained there is also adopted by the teachers’ union GEW and the German civil servants’ association dbb. It applies to all permanent employees in municipal and federal offices (with the exception of Berlin). In earlier times, it was also used in the institutions of private, church or charitable organizations, but this is no longer a matter of course.
And what about the many non-permanent civil servants who do the same work as career changers and “assistants”? They are still being fobbed off with minimum wages.
In a situation where the government is pumping hundreds of billions into armaments and shareholders are seeing soaring stock markets, the new contract comes as open mockery, even a kick, for social workers and educators. He signals to them what the governing politicians have in mind: Not upgrading the social facilities with more staff, smaller groups and better conditions so that the employees have some breathing space. Their institutions are more and more degraded to detention centers.
In recent weeks, not only have thousands of daycare workers and social workers taken to the streets against impossible working conditions, but also nurses, teachers and bus drivers have taken up the fight. In NRW, the nurses at six university hospitals have been waging an open-ended labor dispute since the beginning of May. This movement is part of a global upsurge in strikes and protests against the social impact of the coronavirus pandemic and war.
But the DGB unions, above all Verdi, are on the side of the governments who want to contain this movement at all costs. The traffic light coalition has opted for massive rearmament, and the working class is to bear the cost of this. The Verdi leaders Frank Werneke and Christine Behle, who conducted the negotiations in Potsdam and Berlin, belong to the same governing party, the SPD, as the negotiator on the opposite side, Karin Welge, and share their policies.
The traffic light coalition is determined to reinstate the debt brake next year and return to “black zero”. The population must “make sacrifices,” demanded Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) on March 27 in Bellevue Palace, when he announced the sanctions against Russia with the words: “The whole truth is: there are still many hardships ahead of us. The new conclusion lies on this line, and it clearly shows who should make sacrifices.
The Network of Action Committees for Safe Education calls on all public servants and the entire working class to break through this class logic and not be burned up in a war policy in the interests of the rich and shareholders that will lead to a third world war. No more “profits before life” policy, which has led to 140,000 unnecessary corona deaths in Germany alone!
We propose withdrawing confidence from the DGB unions and setting up independent action committees in each company. Such action committees are already playing an important role, for example in the labor disputes in parts of the US auto industry, at Ford in Germany and Spain, in the international ZeroCovid movement for safe schools and in the tea plantations in Sri Lanka.
As a first step, the sell-out in social and educational services must be decisively rejected! He is not the first of his kind. Frank Werneke’s predecessor at the helm of Verdi, Frank Bsirske (Die Grünen), seven years ago stalled and sold out a major labor dispute over “upgrading” in social and educational services using every trick in the book. Contrary to all promises, the situation has continued to deteriorate since the day-care center strike in 2015. That has to end now.
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