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The leadership at Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, has announced plans to hire 24,000 people as quickly as possible, primarily technicians to work on train and rail maintenance but also train drivers, on-board personnel and computer scientists. The announcement was made just as a decisive round of collective bargaining, on wages and working time, opened and demonstrates a desire to improve performance in the sector, both as regards the punctuality of trains and the service on board. In recent years, Deutsche Bahn has continually hired new staff, bringing overall personnel numbers from 296,000 full-time workers to 310,000. However, the raft of hires has been above all of benefit to logistics subsidiary Schenker and DB Netze the network infrastructure manager, while the central activity of the company has suffered. At the same time, the number of German employees has fallen from 84,400 to 79,900 between 2013 and 2017. The push involves a net investment in wages, with staff costs across the group having increased from 14.7 billion euros to 16.7 billion euros over the last four years. On Thursday and Friday, Deutsche Bahn social partners met to discuss a new collective agreement. The EVG trade union, which is negotiating on behalf of 160,000 in-house employees, is demanding a 7.5% pay rise as well as measures that allow some of that rise to be converted into an increase in free time. Such an option, which was part of the previous agreement, has been demanded by workers who are seeking additional time off. The Deutsche Bahn leadership, who are looking to hire new staff, would like to put limits on this practice and will present an overall offer on Friday 16 November. An agreement is expected to be reached before the festive period.
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