The union Verdi announced on Saturday that it will continue warning strikes at Deutsche Telekom on Monday and Tuesday. The purpose of these actions is to increase pressure on the employers during the third round of negotiations.
Verdi’s demands for this year’s collective bargaining round include a 6.6% pay increase, set for a contract duration of twelve months. Furthermore, the union aims to introduce a “member bonus” of 660 euros annually, and demands a monthly increase of 120 euros for trainees and dual students.
In the lead-up to the negotiations, Verdi negotiator Frank Sauerland criticized the employers, calling their “wait-and-see policy a sign of insufficient appreciation”. He pointed out that while employees generated “record results for the group” over the past two years, the employers had failed to put forward an offer in two separate negotiation rounds.
Coinciding with the third round of discussions in Potsdam, around 3,000 employees are expected to gather for a rally on Monday morning. The strike action is planned for multiple regions: on Monday, employees called to strike are drawn from Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and North Rhine-Westphalia. On Tuesday, the planned strike action will take place in Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Bavaria, and Baden-Württemberg.