Fourth Week of German Public Service Workers’ Strike

Workers' Daily Internet Edition: Article Index :

Fourth Week of German Public Service Workers’ Strike

A discussion with Hamburg strikers: "It is much more serious than 14 years ago"

My Experience As a Doctor Is That, Under PFI, Profit Not Care Comes First

A strike among public service workers in many parts of Germany entered its fourth week on Monday with no sign that municipalities and states were willing to back down in their demand for longer working hours. The states and municipalities are mainly demanding that all staff increase working time from 38.5 hours per week to 40 hours with no extra pay.

The conflict is the first big strike in public services since 1992. The main public service union, Ver.di, has been extending the strike across Germany. The union Ver.di was created five years ago when five smaller unions joined forces, and is one of the world’s largest trade unions, with an estimated 2.4 million members. More than 30,000 workers have stopped work across over half of Germany’s 16 federal states. The wave of strikes began on February 6 in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Refuse collectors, kindergarten teachers, health workers, civil servants and others are all participating in the strike.

It is evident that workers and their union leaders have been drawing the conclusion that enough is enough, and that there is a necessity for workers to unite and gather their strength through mass mobilisation. Health workers in particular are reported to be solidly behind the strike. Thousands of striking workers took to the streets to demonstrate to coincide with talks between union leaders and federal state representatives in Berlin on February 20. The talks broke up without any agreement.

Many workers are covered by wage agreements (the workers in the local communities and the workers of the central state). However, others are not covered by such agreements (the workers of the so-called "Länder", the states of the Federal Republic). Those workers are on strike just to get a wage agreement. Others are fighting against the deterioration of the existing wage agreements – especially against longer working hours – as some of the communities revoked existing agreements in order to impose longer working hours on the workers with no increase in pay. Yet a third section of workers, who have significant fighting traditions, are public service workers such as bus drivers and refuse collectors, who have previously won agreements which they see threatened.

The most important focus of the strike is the fight against the extension of working hours from the present 38½ a week. The government wishes to push through an agreement to bring this figure up to 42 hours a week with no extra pay, as well as trying to cut holiday pay and Christmas bonuses to a minimum.

Because of the intensity of the dispute, the employers are now attempting to get the workers and their unions to concede that younger public sector employees should work 18 minutes longer each day, while older colleagues would only have to work slightly longer, if at all. But this proposal will only be debated again at length during the next central round of negotiations on March 10. Union leaders are pointing out that a longer working week would eventually go hand in hand with the loss of up to 250,000 public sector jobs nationwide. The employers, for their part, are threatening that if the strike continues, the jobs that are at present in the public sector will be put out to private tender. Besides other things, this is an attack on the rights of all workers, involving as it would non-standard and part-time working, contract work and so forth.

The organised workers are regarding the strike as a defining moment for the defence of workers’ interests. One of them is reported as saying, "We are prepared, this is our first strike in fourteen years, but given the effrontery of the employers, it was time to strike." In other words, trade unionists are beginning to get to grips with the new reality and staking defence of their interests on fierce class struggle against the ruling elite and the monopolies who are the enemies of all workers, whether they work in the public sector or private enterprises. This ruling elite, following the dictate of the monopolies, is spearheading its attacks against the public sector and the whole conception of the public good.

The public service workers are fighting a struggle faced by the whole of the working class: the fight against a prolongation of working hours. The strike is underlining the necessity for workers and their trade unions to utilise their collective strength to fight for their own interests. It is underlining that the world has changed and no one can act in the old way.

WDIE salutes the struggle of the German public sector workers, and wishes them victory in their fight, which is a decisive one for workers throughout Europe.

By a WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) reporting team, 25 February 2006

"The situation has changed here dramatically during the past few years," Holger Linné told the World Socialist Web Site. The 46-year-old has worked for the city sanitation department in Hamburg for the past 11 years. He said that the workload had increased considerably.

When he began working, Linné said, his garbage disposal team consisted of five persons—a driver and four colleagues who retrieved, emptied and returned the garbage cans. "Today," he pointed out, "there are only three persons—one driver and two colleagues, who fetch, empty and return."

Linné was standing with about 200 colleagues in front of the sanitation office in Bullerdeich, an industrial area not far from Hamburg city center. The city’s 2,500 sanitation workers had been on strike for one week.

On this particular morning Wolfgang Rose, the regional chairman of the workers’ union, Verdi, was due to come and speak to the strikers. It was cold and drizzling rain. Linné warmed himself before a wood fire burning in an iron basket.

He said he had three children to look after, but did not hesitate in deciding to support the vote to strike. "I do not believe anybody here voted against it. Quite the opposite, if we had our way many more public service departments would have been called out on strike."

He said that while the workload had increased, pay supplements and social security benefits have continuously declined. "It is even worse for those who are younger. Any new jobs are only with short-term contracts with far lower wage rates than those with fixed contracts."

Sven Meyer is 42 years old and has worked for the sanitation department for 15 years. Shortly after he started work the last major public workers strike began in 1992.

"When I look back and compare it with the strike today, I become rather skeptical," he said. "At that time hundreds of thousands were on strike, and we still ended up with a lousy compromise. Since then many jobs have been lost. I believe at least one third of all jobs have gone in our department."

Sven gave an example of the way in which the workload had increased. "Formerly, there were seven large street sweeping machines and one small one. Now there are just two large machines and one small machine. Along with the cutback in sweeping machines has naturally come a loss of jobs. Instead of employing new people, the department calls on us to work overtime, and the workloads have increased substantially. Since the introduction of a new shift system the few machines available have been worked to full capacity."

He continued: "I want to stress one thing. We are not just striking here for ourselves. It is not just about the extra 18 minutes a day (which the employers seek to impose on public service workers throughout Germany), referred to in the media. It concerns much more. If the European Union (Bolkenstein) directives on service regulations are implemented, the privatization of virtually all aspects of public service will rapidly increase. Then anyone can come along and offer rock-bottom wages with no industrial protection or safety standards. Things will really get bad.

"That not only applies to public service, but also to many craftsmen who already have difficulties making ends meet. Every plumber or electrician needs work, and there is already enormous pressure today."

The strike has met with broad public support. Meyer spoke of a delegation from a nearby engine works who came to express their solidarity with the strikers. Workers have also experienced broad support from acquaintances and friends.

"There is a widespread feeling," he said, "that one can no longer tolerate what is going on." The situation was different some years ago. Then skepticism and the fear for one’s own job outweighed everything else. "Now the readiness to strike is once again very widespread."

This support for the strike is bound up with the fact that fresh rounds of redundancies and the dismantling of social gains are everyday events. "Formerly, most businessmen and the big concerns reinvested a part of their profits in their companies to develop production and establish reasonable working conditions for those employed. Today is it completely different. Today money is only extracted.

"When just a few days ago Volkswagen announced the elimination of 20,000 jobs, VW shares soared—that is completely abnormal. But it is the same thing at Telekom, Opel, AEG in Nuremberg. Who will buy the cars or washing machines if ever more people are unemployed and wages continued to drop?"

When asked his opinion on the strike tactics adopted by the union, which has called only 60,000 of the union’s total of 2 million members to ballot for a strike and has sought to decentralize strike actions, Meyer answered: "I do not want to be pinned down to an opinion. I do not know exactly what tactics are being pursued by the central strike committee, but it would be naturally better to develop a very broad movement. If they force us to give in, the repercussions will be bad. Not only will work time be extended to well over 40 hours, it will also be much more difficult for the union."

A Croatian worker joined in the discussion, saying loudly: "This is all far too weak and harmless! We should march on the town hall with clubs in hand." When it was pointed out that the police also had clubs and clubs were not enough to solve the problems confronting workers, a discussion commenced over political questions.

The government was watching the strike very carefully, Meyer declared, but he was pretty sure it would not back down.

Speaking of all of the major political parties, he said, "They are not interested in our problems. They have completely different interests and only listen to what the business executives have to say." He added that this applied to the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

When asked to explain the close links between the unions and the SPD, Meyer and his colleagues did not answer. But there was general agreement that the most important conclusion from the fact that all of the political parties and the unions had made a sharp turn to the right was the necessity to form a new party which uncompromisingly represented workers’ interests.

Frank Fischer, 42, has worked for the sanitation department for 24 years. He compared today’s situation with the strike 14 years previously, and said: "Today the situation is much more serious. There is much more at stake this time. Perhaps one can say we are standing here on behalf of many others."

Frank Jung, 39, said, "If it goes on like this, in a year there will be civil war!" He noted that politicians continually said that one had a responsibility to found a family and bring children into the world. "I have an 18-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter. I can say only that if I had known 20 years ago what was going to happen I would not have had children. It is hardly possible to support a family, never mind higher education.

"If you ask me about the government, then I have only one word: ‘criminals.’ And that applies to all of them—irrespective of which party. I can no longer listen to their speeches. Promises that there will be more training places, better training and everything else. And what does the government do? Exactly the opposite.

"There is all this talk of responsibility—individual responsibility. But what the government is doing is completely irresponsible. They can bring about the greatest misery, but take responsibility for nothing, exactly like the employers. They look out only for themselves, then there is generosity, if without limits."

Margarete Hagemeister, 36, is the single parent of an 11-year-old daughter. "When I began working here at the end of 1999 I worked four hours, now I work six. But whoever works part-time usually has to carry the workload of a full-time job. Formerly I was employed in the private sector and earned nearly twice as much. Now we have to make do with a minimal income. There is no possibility of making large-scale purchases or taking vacations. We have not even taken daily showers for a long time.

"I think everybody should strike—everybody in public services and also in the private sector. The government does not understand any other language. They are on their own trip and are just working to feather their own nests. And the SPD is no exception. When I see Ole von Beust (the Christian Democratic mayor of Hamburg) I see them all. He always turns up in his fine suits, but does not have a clue about the problems and needs of an ordinary family.

"In addition to my work here I am also a teacher, because the schools have no more money and an increasing number of school hours are being lost. Recently at a parents’ evening it was decided that parents should train themselves in certain teaching subjects. Work folders were put together. Besides being a teacher and a public worker, I am still a charwoman, washer woman, cook and so on. Ole von Beust and the other politicians do not have the slightest notion of such things."

by Lucy Chapman*, New Statesman, February 6, 2006

The new University College Hospital towers above me as I stand waiting for my friend to finish work. It is a shaft of gleaming white and green, dwarfing the surrounding buildings. Both of us being junior doctors, when we finally sit down, the conversation turns to work. My usually mild-mannered and politically neutral friend is incensed. "Lucy, I can't believe it – they've put the cleaners in charge of the hospital!" Interserve, a company formerly in charge of cleaning in the old hospital, is now part of the consortium that owns and manages the new one, in partnership with two construction firms, Balfour Beatty and Amec. This consortium is one of many currently building and running 78 hospitals across the UK under the government's private finance initiative (PFI) scheme.

As a medical student I trained at UCH and the Middlesex Hospital. Both were in a state of disrepair after 20 years of underfunding and neglect. There was no question that investment was needed. The new hospital, which opened last June, is the London flagship rebuilt under PFI, and was designed to replace both existing facilities. Anyone who has been following press reports will already be aware of some of the issues surrounding UCH: the hugely overbudget cost, that it has fewer beds than the hospitals it was supposed to replace, the management wheeze of saving money by putting cancer patients up in hotels rather than on the wards and, latterly, the move to advertise for patients. What you won't know – unless you know a doctor or a nurse who works in one – is how the new ownership arrangements and management rules that PFI brings with it can affect your care once you become an NHS patient in a PFI hospital. Many doctors can tell stories of experiences similar to the ones my friends and I have had.

UCH is the hospital where a doctor I know, attending to a young man with a broken arm in casualty in the middle of the night, could not find any plaster of Paris. The young man was in terrible pain, and you don't need much medical training to know that the treatment is prompt replacement of the bone fragments to their correct position, and application of a cast to keep them there. This is not the sort of problem that can wait until the morning, but the A&E manager told my friend that there was no plaster in the hospital: "No, there isn't any and we won't be taking delivery of new stock until tomorrow afternoon." Why not, my friend wanted to know. Because it was not efficient to get in extra supplies at night, the manager said.

It will be obvious to any reader who has ever been to hospital that this sort of thing can happen anywhere and does. Inefficiency, administrative errors, lack of equipment and infuriating red tape are by no means the preserve of privately run hospitals. The difference is the system of priorities. In a conventional NHS hospital someone would be sent to find the plaster, even if that meant getting it couriered in, or going in a taxi to borrow it from another hospital – because the bottom line is treating the patient. Doctors are used to running, begging and negotiating with nurses, bed managers and radiologists to get the necessary treatments for patients. What we have not been used to is a manager flatly refusing to allow us to treat our patients adequately.

Another doctor I know was stuck between two auto-locking doors in a corridor in the new building. Trying to go the quick way to get to a patient in A&E, he found out too late that his swipe card allowed him in but not out. He was on call for the night, and the acutely unwell patient had been referred to him for assessment and admission. As his pager bleeped insistently, he rang the helpdesk from his mobile phone to explain that he was the doctor on call and needed to be let out urgently.

"I'm sorry, doctor, you don't have authorisation to get through those doors," said a bored voice at the other end of the line. "Can you look at the rota? My name is there. I need to be downstairs now." "We don't have access to the rota – you can go to the office between 11 and 12 tomorrow." "I really need to get out now; there's a very unwell patient in casualty. Can someone let me out?" "Sorry, doctor, the company that deals with ID cards is not on-site, and we're not authorised to release you." Eventually, security guards arrived and had to break the doors to override the system and let my friend out.

My friends involved in these two incidents did not report them officially. This is not unusual: the reporting procedures in hospitals are so time-consuming, and so often lead to such complex cycles of blame, that doctors are very reluctant to embark on them.

Cost-cutting and corner-cutting in relation to patient care and working conditions at the new UCH have quickly be-come infamous among medics. A single trainee surgeon initially looked after patients across the full spectrum of surgical conditions admitted each night at UCH, and another junior doctor covered all of the surgical in-patients already on wards at the Middlesex Hospital. With the move of in-patients from the Middlesex to UCH last autumn, the hospital trust managers tried to get rid of the second on-call doctor, leaving just one senior house officer (junior doctor) to care for all surgical patients admitted to UCH overnight. This includes patients in general surgery, orthopaedics, vascular and plastic surgery, and urology admissions – and the same doctor was on call to see and assess emergency patients in casualty, deal with trauma cases and be available for operating theatres.

The loss of the second on-call doctor in charge of in-patients left the remaining junior doctor responsible for a further three floors full of surgical patients – approximately 150 more people, more than doubling their workload. If two patients become acutely unwell at the same time in different parts of the hospital, no single doctor can treat them both. There was a stay of execution in late autumn, when the junior doctors concerned re-fused to continue working under these circumstances – on the grounds that the arrangement was endangering patients – and forced the reinstatement of the second on-call doctor, at least for the time being.

The latest expense-saving plan believed to be under consideration is to shave £70,000 from the annual mental health bill either by axing one or more of the medical staff covering the wards, or doing away with psychiatric services for medical and surgical in-patients. Instead, people who become depressed, suicidal or psychotic would be wheeled back to A&E for assessment.

A hospital owned and operated by a private consortium is loyal first to shareholders, not to patients, and it shows. At a northern PFI hospital where I myself have worked, we had to admit patients over-night in near-total darkness: the power to the wards had to be cut for several hours a day, for fear that the generators keeping the life-support machines going in intensive care would fail. It must have been odd for the patients to be admitted by someone they could barely see. But it could get worse for them (and me): in one case, I realised the next day that the patient was yellow from liver disease – something I simply couldn't see in the dark. At the same hospital, in an emergency situation, I had to take a haemorrhaging patient's blood three times in an attempt to get it cross-matched for transfusion – and each time the lab denied receiving any blood samples. The lab was a long way away in this vast hospital, so the blood bottles had to go in a chute. There was a problem with the chute but no one could help, because "if it is a problem with the chute, that's owned by a different company". This company, I later discovered, did not offer an out-of-hours service.

My opposition to the privatisation and fragmentation of the National Health Service is medical. My experience of PFI, and that of my medical friends, leads me to the conclusion that the management of hospitals, supplies, deliveries and support services is being conducted according to the priorities of profit-making organisations. And further, that the privatisation of basic facilities and support services, the unseen infrastructure of the health service, poses a serious threat to the quality of patient care and to the safety of patients on the wards.

The bottom line is no longer medical effectiveness; it is cost-effectiveness. As far as I can see, at the new UCH – the modern template of an NHS hospital – there is enough money for shiny windows, for an advertising budget, and for more managers to push through political targets; and enough money to guarantee generous profits for the consortium. What cannot be afforded, not without an almost continuous fight, is the cash to find plaster of Paris when it is needed, to have the people available when necessary to authorise releasing a doctor from an auto-locking corridor, or to pay a bare minimum of two junior doctors overnight to cover the surgical wards full of patients. Costs are being cut where they won't be evident to the public, at least not until it really matters. This is the "choice agenda" in action.

* Lucy Chapman is a pseudonym. The writer is a junior doctor who works in an NHS hospital.