For seven months now, retail workers in North Rhine-Westphalia have been in a wage dispute with the bosses of the so-called German Retail Association.While the trade association wants to force the strikers, who are represented by Verdi, to the negotiating table, the union speaks of a "wage dictate" and "blackmail". The reason for this is that the labor buyers want to get the employees to agree to a collective bargaining offer on December 28 at the federal level in a pilot agreement in Hamburg. Prior to this, however, the trade association refused to agree to regional wage negotiations for months.

The union is demanding a higher hourly wage of at least 2.50 euros for a period of one year. The agreement proposed by the trade association does not even offer half of this. According to them, there is to be just a paltry 1.04 euros more and that over a whole two years. As in other rounds of negotiations in other sectors, an "inflation compensation bonus" of 750 euros is also being offered. This may sound like a lot, but here too it is a stun grenade from the labor buyers, because it is not a real wage increase affecting the pay scale, but a real wage loss, as even Verdi's demands are being eaten up by inflation. And so the employees once again find themselves in a situation where the social democratic leaders of the yellow unions are not even demanding the minimum to stop the impoverishment of the employees and at the same time are not in a position to enforce even these meagre demands on the labor buyers.

Although the union is now also announcing strikes during the Christmas period in order to increase the pressure on the trade association. And according to bourgeois media reports, a total of over 600,000 potential strikers from the retail, wholesale and foreign trade sectors in North Rhine-Westphalia alone are prepared to lay down their work for these demands. But how promising this concentrated power is in the hands of the union bureaucrats, who have betrayed almost every strike in the current year in one way or another, must be considered soberly.

There will be larger strike gatherings, particularly in the Dortmund area. Employees at the Swedish clothing chain H&M are to strike there on Friday together with Amazon workers at the Dortmund and Werne sites. Kaufland stores and other retail outlets in Bochum and Recklinghausen are also affected by the strikes. But here, too, it is clear that the full potential of the workers is not being used. Instead of using the pressure during the Christmas period effectively to strike in the most populous federal state in the city centers during the Christmas period and thus build up full pressure on the trade association, strikes are only taking place at specific locations, which allow the workers to compensate for the lost profits by simply driving to the nearest town and shopping there.  Meanwhile, the labor buyers are openly threatening to withdraw their poor offer if Verdi does not sit down at the negotiating table in Hamburg on December 28 and accept it. As is so often the case, it remains to be said that the willingness of colleagues to fight has been high throughout the year and continues to be so, but without the establishment of combative trade unions that truly represent the interests of the workers, there will necessarily be betrayal by the social democratic trade union leaders.

 Cover Image: https://www.waz.de/wirtschaft/kein-weihnachtsfrieden-verdi-streikt-im-handel-bis-samstag-id240862612.html