MORE than 20,000 German doctors are taking strike action all this week demanding a cut in working hours and a 30-per-cent pay rise. The strike is the biggest ever health service workers’ strike in Germany and hospitals are providing only emergency services.
German doctors are contracted to work 40 hours a week, but most work double those hours as unpaid overtime. They earn an average of £38,000 a year before tax, compared with £86,000 in the United States and £63,000 in Britain.
The doctors’ union, the Marbunger Bund, has been organising a series of one-day strikes for the past two months, but decided on the extended strike after talks with the Tdl state employers broke down.
The fact that doctors in Germany are taking strike action is symptomatic of growing anger among large sections of the working class at stagnating living standards, cuts in welfare provisions and demands from the employers, who are backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, for longer working hours.
When the doctors began their strike on Monday, Ver.di, Germany’s huge public service workers’ union, called a one-day strike by its 110,000 members at Deutsche Telekom, for a six-per-cent pay claim and against the company’s demand for increased working hours.
Last week 6,000 Ver.di members staged warning strikes at 60 sites around the country and the union’s chief negotiator, Lothar Schröder, rejected the latest offer from the company of a one-off, lump-sum payment of £600.
The growing militancy of German workers and sections of the middle class comes as the popularity of Merkel’s Christian Democrat-Social Democrat, ‘Grand Coalition’ government is plummeting amid a series of scandals.
These include Norbert Röttgen, the Parliamentary manager of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, becoming the chief executive of the BDI industry federation’s lobbying group.
German workers are clearly inspired by the huge movement of workers and youth in France a month ago, which saw students occupying universities, three general strikes and hundreds of thousands demonstrating in major cities.
This movement defeated President Jacques Chirac’s and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s new law allowing employers to sack on the spot, young people under the age of 26.
Villepin is still suffering the aftermath of this massive defeat. He faced a censure motion in the National Assembly yesterday over one of the scandals that has engulfed the ruling Gaullist party.
The parallels and connections between the situation in Germany and that in France and Britain are obvious.
Many members of the German Ver.di service workers’ union will be aware of the recent mass strikes by sections of workers in Britain, like PCS members employed by the Department of Work and Pensions and local council workers fighting to defend their pensions.
In addition, the crisis of the Blair government is world news. Two weeks ago three ministers were engulfed in scandals and the government is still surrounded by ‘funds for honours’ allegations.
It is clear to workers in Germany, France, Britain and throughout western Europe, that their futures are welded together by the fact that many of the attacks they confront are being orchestrated by the bankers’ and monopolists’ European Union (EU).
The European capitalist classes are using the EU to drive ahead with their plans to slash jobs, cut pay, increase working hours, smash employment rights and destroy welfare provisions, using the battle cries of the ‘free market’ and ‘globalisation’.
With the working class on the move in the largest countries of the capitalist EU, what is clearly needed is united strike action to defeat the employers’ offensive and smash the EU, and to go forward to workers’ governments and a Socialist United States of Europe.
To lead such a struggle to victory, a new revolutionary leadership, that is sections of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, must be built by workers and youth in France and Germany, alongside the building of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain.
