BVG workers are going on another 48-hour strike on Wednesday and Thursday. When U-Bahns, trams, and busses stop, life in Berlin becomes unbearable. As the podcast Megan’s Megacan put it, Berliners are famous for rudeness — we are not the people you want around during a transport crisis. Even if you somehow didn’t notice the strike, you would still feel it in your throat; increased car traffic makes air pollution spike.
The 16,000 employees of the BVG are responsible for over a billion trips every year, or around 3 million per day. On social media, frustrated commuters ask why the union can’t reach an agreement with company.
ver.di, the service sector union, is demanding raises of at least 750 euros per month. According to Tagesspiegel, bus drivers in Berlin earn less than almost anywhere else in Germany. You don’t need to be a public transport expert to figure out that Berlin is not the easiest place to drive a bus.
Low wages lead to chronic personnel shortages. Every time a train gets cancelled, that means the BVG either lacked a driver or lacked a carriage (or both). Ultimately, train shortages also come down to understaffing, as there aren’t enough people to maintain the rolling stock. This is the result of decades of underinvestment. Every day, workers struggle to keep 40-year-old subways running far beyond their intended lifespan.
In this crisis situation, what is management offering? A “raise” that is below the inflation rate, so in effect a wage cut. This will lead more BVG workers to seek better employment, making things worse for everyone in the city.
As always, politicians claim there is no money. The Berlin government’s austerity plans include massive cuts in public transport. Yet somehow, each member of the BVG’s management board gets half a million euros per year, plus a company car with a chauffeur. I’ve never understood the logic here. Why should a public transport company be run by people who never use public transport? A board made up of workers and riders would be much more effective.
The problem is much bigger, though. Last week, the German government passed a constitutional amendment to allow unlimited military spending — they are now planning to borrow a trillion euros in the next decade to buy weapons. So the neoliberal mantra was a lie, there was always money available, they just didn’t want to spend it on schools or hospitals.
The BVG’s endless crisis started in the early 2000s. The “red-red” Berlin Senate at the time, made up of SPD and PDS (the forerunner of Die Linke), pushed through drastic wage cuts and layoffs. The BVG has never recovered.
This gives the strike a highly political character, whether union leaders want it or not. It is part of a huge class struggle underway in Germany revolving around the question of whether workers will accept cuts in their standard of living in order to finance the biggest rearmament program since the Nazi era. Or, perhaps, if that money will go to fighting the climate crisis by expanding public transport. A victory by BVG workers would be a sign of the working class rejecting militarism.
Even if it’s inconvenient, all of us need to get on our bikes and show solidarity with BVG strikers. The most famous BVG strike was back in 1932. Then as now, the conditions at this huge company affect workers throughout the city.
Red Flag is a weekly column on Berlin politics that appears every Friday. Nathaniel Flakin missed last week due to a struggle with depression, and is hoping to catch up.
