While the Berlin House of Representatives dealt with the nursing strike for the first time, employees in the capital’s largest laboratory are also preparing for a strike. According to Tagesspiegel information, dozens of laboratory workers want to go on strike on Friday.
It is the first labor dispute in the “Labor Berlin”, where around 60 million analyzes are carried out every year. Verdi confirmed the one-day strike on request. The union demands the management to start collective negotiations in order to introduce the public service collective agreement for laboratory workers: The so-called TVÖD applies in the main clinics of Vivantes and Charité, which operate the large laboratory as a subsidiary.
In the Vivantes clinics and the also state-owned Charité, the nurses have been on strike since Thursday, but there for a better staff quota at the sick beds. In the “Labor Berlin”, Verdi wants to enforce that the wages for all 700 employees are raised to TVÖD level, which would mean up to 300 euros more for many of the laboratory assistants.
In the corona crisis, Europe’s largest hospital laboratory for evaluating Sars-Cov-2 samples in Berlin is indispensable. Thousands of samples a day were checked for Sars-Cov-2 there in the spring, hundreds of them tested positive for the corona virus.
The head office of the laboratory is located on the Virchow campus of the Charité in Berlin-Wedding. Active people in the laboratory say that a protest rally is planned in front of the headquarters in Sylter Strasse on Friday.
Read more about the fight in healthcare at Tagesspiegel Plus:
On Thursday, nurses from the University Clinic and Vivantes protested in the House of Representatives – while the parliamentarians dealt with two motions to strike. The CDU parliamentary group wrote in its application that the red-red-green Senate was responsible for the two state-owned hospital chains and should be asked to ensure “better working conditions” there.
The coalition factions of the SPD, the Left and the Greens wrote in a motion that the House of Representatives should decide to support the “demands of the workers”. In addition, the Senate is being asked to instruct the hospital board members to negotiate during strikes and to conclude the usual emergency service agreements with Verdi.
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At the same time, what is legally correct, the three parliamentary groups wrote: The federal government regulates personnel financing, the “principles of which cannot be changed by the State of Berlin”. Charité boss Heyo Kroemer and Vivantes board member Johannes Danckert had also pointed out these federal regulations, according to which clinics are paid for per diagnosis by the health insurance companies.
Danckert called for a “complete reform of the health system”: Vivantes could not afford to pay full TVÖD in the laboratory under current conditions, nor could it afford to introduce TVÖD in the subsidiaries for cleaning and kitchen.
