West News Wire: In a continuing disagreement over pay rises, workers at the airports in Berlin and Hamburg staged walkouts on Monday, resulting in flight disruptions in both German cities.
According to the German news agency dpa, all 220 outbound planes and 70 of 240 arriving flights were cancelled in Berlin. The Hamburg airport said in the early morning that 50 of 160 departures had been cancelled due to a walkout that had been abruptly called by the trade union ver.di.
The walkouts were scheduled to go until midnight and began at 3:30 a.m.
The union wants to exert more pressure on the firms with whom it is negotiating overtime pay guidelines and bonuses for extra work hours, such as those on the weekend.
At Berlin’s BER airport, employees in the aviation security area, passenger control and personnel and goods control went on strike on Monday. Since passengers cannot be checked and then allowed into the security area without these employees, the airport had to cancel all passenger flight departures.
The union has staged frequent walkouts over recent months three at Berlin airport this year so far to underline its demands, with local transport, hospitals and other public services hit.
On the weekend, German government officials and labor unions reached a pay deal for more than 2.5 million public-sector workers, ending a lengthy dispute and heading off the possibility of disruptive all-out strikes. That agreement did not include airport employees, however.
For Wednesday, ver.di union announced further walkouts for local public transportation companies in the states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg, where no agreements have been reached yet.
