Disappointed and angry – that sums up the mood among the employees of the Sophien and Hufeland Hospital in Weimar. Almost half of them have organized themselves in ver.di, elected a collective bargaining committee and called on their diaconal employer to negotiate a collective agreement. However, the church, the diaconate and the hospital management have not only categorically rejected this, but have also filed a lawsuit against a call for a warning strike, which was subsequently called off.
“We feel like we’ve been insulted,” says Mathias Korn, a specialist nurse who is involved in the employee representation and with ver.di. “All we want is to have a say in our working conditions, just as is possible in secular companies. As an employee, but also as a Christian, I find it very irritating that the Diakonie and the Church are reacting to this with rejection and accusation.” After all, the Church otherwise stands for dialogue and participation, but it does not live up to this claim towards its own employees.
The colleagues at the Weimar Clinic actually wanted to go on a warning strike for the first time on August 1st to emphasize their demand for collective bargaining. But the Protestant Church, the Diakonisches Werk Mitteldeutschland and the clinic management applied to the Erfurt Labor Court in an expedited procedure to ban the strike. The court initially decided without an oral hearing and then scheduled it for August 2nd – one day after the planned warning strike. “We have never experienced this procedure before,” criticized Bernd Becker, who is responsible for the health care system at ver.di in Thuringia. “Instead of sitting down with us at the table, the employers’ side is trying by all means to prevent the employees from enforcing their legitimate demands.” Because the expedited procedure had not yet been completed, ver.di canceled the planned warning strike as a precautionary measure.
To express their displeasure with the employer’s actions, around 250 employees demonstrated in front of the hospital on August 5 with an “active lunch break” – even more than in previous actions of this kind. “The message is clear: the employees of the Sophien and Hufeland Hospital do not want to have their basic rights taken away from them,” explained union representative Bernd Becker. “They are still willing to campaign for good working conditions. The employer should no longer block this commitment.”
Mathias Korn made it clear that his colleagues in Weimar are not just interested in more money. “We want to be paid appropriately for our stressful and important work – that’s clear,” said the nurse. Employees in the lower pay groups in particular are significantly worse off in the church’s own regulations of the Diakonie Mitteldeutschland than in the collective agreement for the public service (TVöD). For example, a nursing assistant who has been trained for one year and has many years of experience earns up to 900 euros less per month.
“But we are also concerned with democratic co-determination,” stressed Mathias Korn. “We want our working conditions to no longer be decided on by committees behind closed doors, but that we ourselves can have an influence.” The fact that this is not possible within the church’s internal “third way” was recently shown with the inflation compensation bonus: although around 10,000 Diakonie employees in central Germany signed up for a higher bonus, the employers simply ignored this. “We want transparent negotiations on an equal footing,” the union representative sums it up. He and his colleagues want to continue to work towards this – despite the legal maneuvers of their employer.
