10th May 2015 07:23 clock

A woman waits in Munich on a train.

A woman waiting for a train in Munich. | © Andreas Gebert / dpa

The train drivers’ union GDL plans at present no other rail strike. “The land and rail passengers now have earned a break – and the web is a pause for reflection to respond,” said GDL boss Claus Weselsky the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . He did not limit the duration of the “break”, but assured that there were currently no plans for a new strike.

After a week of the longest strike of GDL at Deutsche Bahn is now at nine clock to end. Train passengers can still not breathe easy: Because even the much larger union ECG is considering paralyze the passenger. Its chairman Alexander Kirchner told the newspaper there were two hearings in May, then there must be a conclusion to be reached. “If we do not move forward, we do not rule out strike. But we do not go on strike just because others go on strike.”

The strike began on Monday and on Tuesday in passenger transport in freight transport. Especially in East Germany, where the train drivers’ union GDL is more organized, rolled only about 15 percent of the trains. In the West there were up to two thirds. In conurbations In addition, the S-Bahn was affected. The GDL wants in the months since faltering labor dispute for all professional groups of the train crew erstreiten own collective agreements.

In order to avoid labor disputes in the web in the future, argues the former Federal Transport Minister Peter Ramsauer (CSU) for all to verbeamten 20,000 train drivers. “The excessive strike the GDL is an unintended consequence of the rail reform,” the chairman of the economic committee said in parliament the Bild am Sonntag . “If there is no sanity, train drivers must be civil servants again. We can not let cripple our country.”

engineer with civil servant status, currently around 5,000, are not covered by the collective agreement and may not strike. They were set before the privatization of the railway in 1994.