Deutsche Bahn sues GDL over temporary employment agency
The train drivers' union GDL has founded a temporary employment agency and wants to poach employees from Deutsche Bahn in order to lend them out to companies. To this end, it has concluded a collective agreement with the new company. In the opinion of Deutsche Bahn, this is a questionable construct that is now to be assessed by a court.
According to its own statements, Deutsche Bahn is taking legal action against the train drivers' union in the wage dispute with the GDL. The Group has filed a so-called declaratory action with the Hessian State Labor Court, a Deutsche Bahn spokesperson announced. In this way, Deutsche Bahn is having the court clarify whether the GDL has lost its collective bargaining capacity through its temporary workers' cooperative Fair Train. The union did not comment initially. In the current collective bargaining negotiations, Deutsche Bahn and GDL are fighting for higher wages, but above all for shorter working hours for shift workers.
The background to the lawsuit that has now been filed is that the union has founded a kind of temporary employment agency for train drivers, the Fair Train cooperative, and has concluded a collective agreement with it. According to its own statements, Fair Train received a permit from the competent authority to provide temporary workers last September and has since been looking for train drivers to provide them to "well-known customers" "throughout Germany". Deutsche Bahn accuses the GDL of simultaneously acting as an employer and a trade union.
Meanwhile, the GDL's wage dispute with Deutsche Bahn is deadlocked. The GDL accused Deutsche Bahn of blocking the central demand for a reduction in working hours with full wage compensation and declared the negotiations to have failed in December. In a ballot of union members, they voted by a large majority to extend the industrial action, with the threat of strikes lasting several days from next Monday.
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Deutsche Bahn believes that the GDL's establishment of the Fair Train cooperative, which acts as a temporary employment agency for train drivers, and their subsequent collective bargaining agreement with the company, constitutes a questionable construct that challenges their collective bargaining capacity. The lawsuit filed by Deutsche Bahn aims to have this construct evaluated by the court.
The German Railroad (Deutsche Bahn) claims that the GDL, through its temporary employment agency Fair Train, is simultaneously functioning as an employer and a trade union, which they believe is not permissible under their current collective bargaining agreement.
Source: www.ntv.de
