On January 23 the German Teach Drivers’ Union (GDL) launched a cooperative identified as Good Train e.G. The first 7 users of the cooperative involve the head of the GDL, Claus Weselsky, and his designated successor, Mario Reiss. The cooperative is a temporary work company that is to “lend” prepare drivers to rail transportation providers.
The GDL wants to “set new expectations,” Weselsky defined on June 5. The project was introduced that day collectively with the union’s wage needs at a GDL normal assembly, and then introduced to the media in Berlin. The GDL claims that with Truthful Teach it has “founded a corporation that provides reasonable ailments when it will come to choosing out locomotive drivers.” Weselsky enthused to his associates that the “centuries-outdated model of cooperatives” would resolve all their difficulties.
In point, the opposite is the scenario. The cooperative is a lure and each individual prepare driver should be aware of it. It marks a new stage in the transformation of trade unions into resources of the significant organizations and into companies exploiting the workers themselves.
By location up its personal short-term function company, the GDL is maneuvering its customers into a unsafe scenario. The latter are expected to resign from the governing administration-owned Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) and other firms, and place many years of social gains at threat in get to sign on with the recently founded Truthful Coach. A capitalist manager, Peter Bosse, who has been head of human assets at many firms for 22 many years, most not long ago at the insolvent Abellio Rail NRW and Vias Rail, has been appointed CEO.
In watch of the latest extraordinary deficiency of staff members, the GDL claims it will lend train drivers to the railway corporations on greater phrases than they are at the moment utilized. But this is an totally naive calculation. Who will spend for instruction, ill pay out, company pensions and—in the case of motorists who have attained civil services status—government pensions? What happens when educate motorists are dismissed by the rail firms? As momentary employees they can’t declare proper protection against dismissal and Truthful Train will not be ready to continue on paying their salaries for long.
Good Prepare also wants to make a financial gain, Weselsky emphasised. “Not only are we opening a firm, but it will really swiftly work economically to make gains for the benefit of all.”
Considering that it is a cooperative, the income will be dispersed to users. But right before that happens, operating costs, a enormous bureaucratic apparatus and the board salaries of Truthful Train have to be financed, which, based on encounter, will not be modest. The loaned-out practice motorists will get only a fraction of what the rail corporations pay Truthful Practice for its services.
Good Teach also has to compete in the capitalist industry versus rough competitiveness from staff businesses like MEV and rail corporations that have been in the organization for years and can draw on in depth global means. Good Prepare is explicitly fully commited to the capitalist sector overall economy. On its web-site, it cites “free-industry action” as its first principle—i.e., right before “fair wages” and “socially satisfactory doing work disorders.”
In an job interview with Tilo Jung as portion of his “Young and Naive” structure, Weselsky replied in the adhering to manner to a concern about Karl Marx: “We’re not in a class war, we’re in a marketplace economic system.” Once again and once more Weselsky pressured the significance of creating gains. “A business enterprise that does not make a financial gain is not a business.”
What is extra, Deutsche Bahn will undoubtedly use the GDL initiative to established up its individual temporary employment agencies and outsource important places of rail operations, as several significant companies have been executing for a extensive time. The entire approach quantities to a variety of Ryan Air-isation of the railways. Small-value airline Ryan Air has perfected the procedure of outsourcing and applying agreement labour, employing pilots and crews at rock-base wages.
This treacherous transfer by the GDL effectively amounts to dividing the rail workforce and banning them from placing. The spin-off into a short term work company drives a wedge amongst train drivers and the other railway employees, thus undermining any popular wrestle. In simple fact, it implies supplying up the ideal to strike, for the reason that the educate drivers’ companies are then no more time the rail companies, but Fair Train—that is, in accordance to Weselsky, the drivers themselves.
In the 19th century, Catholic and Protestant social reformers like Adolph Kolping and Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, to whom Weselsky explicitly refers, launched cooperatives, purchaser associations and people’s banking companies to secure farmers, craftsmen, modest traders and staff from the worst excesses of huge organization. At the commence of the 20th century, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg denounced this sort of tries to “change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade.”
Kolping and Raiffeisen decisively rejected a socialist point of view, which at that time was gaining large reputation in the form of guidance for the Social Democratic Social gathering (SPD). Raiffeisen, born in the identical yr as Marx, under no circumstances questioned the capitalist gain program and the point out and turned down communists and socialists as a “subversive celebration.”
In the 21st century, when world wide money teams and businesses dominate economic lifetime in each region, these principles are completely reactionary. Neither practice motorists nor any other portion of workers can defend their incomes and legal rights as impartial forces in a capitalist market place dominated by billionaire monopolies. This can only be carried out with the techniques of class struggle. They will have to unite throughout professions, sectors and countries and jointly confront the corporations and the overall capitalist system.
This is specifically what the GDL’s initiative seeks to prevent at all prices.
The GDL and Weselsky
The expert union GDL arrived to prominence in 2007 and 2008 when it led an 11-week strike. Many railway workers subsequently remaining the rival EVG union, which was firmly in the palms of railway administration and turned to the supposedly more militant GDL. The German government reacted to this and related developments in aviation, the place the flight attendants’ union UFO and the pilots’ union Cockpit organised strikes, by introducing its Collective Bargaining Unity Act, which massively limited the legal rights of more compact unions.
In 2014 and 2015, the GDL all over again organised nationwide strikes lasting numerous days, which, among other factors, ended up directed versus the Collective Bargaining Unity Act. At the time, the Socialist Equality Party defended the GDL versus the government’s attacks, but warned that thanks to its narrow standpoint as a specialist union it would stab the strikers in the back.
The coach drivers and conductors are “confronted with political tasks and a political wrestle,” we wrote. “This has come to be plainly noticeable in the past number of times. Weselsky applied each chance to make crystal clear to the federal govt that he did not want to fight in opposition to it, but rather work with it.”
What is required, we mentioned, is an global and socialist viewpoint: “Weselsky and the GDL pretend that even in an age of international crisis a national union can protect the pursuits of workers if it is merely a little much more militant and fewer corrupt. But this is an illusion. In fact, the battle to protect workers’ rights and gains specifically raises the query of political point of view. And below the sectional unions agree with the mainstream DGB unions, inspite of other conflicts. The two recognise the capitalist financial gain method.”
Since then, the GDL has continuously offered out industrial motion. In September 2021, it identified as off a strike shortly right before the federal election and agreed a miserable wage settlement. “Weselsky, who is himself a member of the Christian Democratic Union [CDU], does not want the federal election and the subsequent development of a governing administration to choose area in a problem in which the prepare drivers’ strike will become the beginning stage for a broad strike motion and radicalisation of the doing the job class,” we commented at the time.
Very last Monday, the GDL also announced its requires for the forthcoming contract negotiations, due in the autumn. Despite document inflation, the calls for are lessen than all those of the EVG, which has been pressured to organise two nationwide warning strikes in latest weeks due to tension from its associates, and is now desperately seeking to market them out. In addition to a onetime tax-absolutely free inflation quality of €3,000 [$US 3,281], the GDL is only demanding a monthly €555 excess for a period of 12 months. It is also demanding some enhancements in doing work occasions.
A couple weeks in the past, the GDL already acknowledged a considerable true wage reduction at two SWEG rail corporations in Baden-Württemberg, with pay back will increase of just 4.8 percent around 22 months.
The initiative to outsource train motorists into a short-term work agency managed by the GDL, represents a new very low for the union. Under disorders the place highly effective class struggles are developing all over the world, the GDL is looking for to isolate train motorists and maneuver them into a lifeless stop. Its hottest proposal delivers but a different motive why workers will have to split with the union bureaucracies. The answer can only be for workers to unite internationally in unbiased action committees.
Between educate motorists and railway workers, Weselsky’s task has so much met with scant approval. Remarks expressing scepticism and rejection are multiplying on the web.
1 employee sarcastically writes: “Yo, all railway workers know how fantastic temporary work businesses are.” “Shouldn’t momentary personnel earn a superior 30 % a lot more?” asks a person critic on the net. Another writes: “Market economic system in our neoliberal feeling results in course struggles.” And however another writes, “Why need to a railway make revenue? That does not operate. Transport should be oriented toward the frequent very good, not revenue!” and refers in individual to the issue of safety.
Even at the GDL basic meeting, sceptical voices had been lifted. “We have to digest this initially,” reported a single drver. “Is this meant to be a staff provider provider now?” Another one particular questioned no matter if it was attainable to signal up for a portion-time occupation 1st without having promptly supplying up one’s complete time career at DB. A further pointed out that “not absolutely everyone has €500 at their disposal without more ado.” And but a different pointed out that a entire segment of train motorists savored civil servant standing. “Should we give that up now?”
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