At the same time a million construction workers who belong to the IG Bau union have cast ballots to determine whether or not to go on strike June 17. A walkout would be the first in the industry in more than 50 years. Construction workers voted after the company rejected the union’s demand for a 4.5 percent pay increase. Labor disputes are also brewing among insurance and bank employees, strike votes are pending if the bosses do not agree to wage demands.

Some 10,000 telephone and postal workers in Hamburg and Munich stopped operations at Deutsche Telekom’s call centers and Deutsche Post June 10 to press on their demand for a 6.5 percent wage hike.

A week earlier 200 postal workers in Hamburg and Cottbus stopped deliveries of an estimated 100,000 packages and letters. The union has warned that the strikes would spread to the rest of the country and could be extended to include bank and insurance companies’ employees.

Verdi represents more than 4 million public employees and other workers in the service industry. The current wage negotiations will affect 120,000 employees at Deutsche Telekom and 240,000 postal workers.

A company as profitable as Deutsche Post should be in a position to pay its employees a respectable wage, said a trade union official in the southern region of Bavaria, where strike preparations are under way. The national mail carrier has rejected the union’s proposal, calling it out of the question.

These latest wave of strike actions come on the heels of a successful fight by the metal workers union in May that forced the bosses in the auto industry to agree to the union’s demand for a 4 percent wage increase.

German capitalists economists and the big-business press have insisted that wage increases higher than 3 percent would be damaging to Germany’s weak economic recovery. The German bosses warned of further job losses if they were forced to pay more.

Speaking at a strike meeting in Hamburg, Verdi union president Frank Bsirske said that the union demand was "justified pay for work that will make an economic upswing in Germany at all possible. Nothing will happen without pressure. So, we’re starting today."

"After a prolonged period of economic stagnation, German workers are increasingly sceptical of government and employers’ argument that wage moderation is the key to recovery," noted a BBC report describing the sentiment during the wage negotiations.

Workers in the printing industry won a 3.4 percent raise at the end of May. According to news reports union members threatened to disrupt newspaper production during the football World Cup.  
 
 
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