Three-quarters of Qbuzz’s bus drivers are out of work in our province today, the bus operator reports. Today is the first day of a three-day strike in regional transport.
Railway union VVMC calls on staff of the Vechtdal line (Zwolle – Emmen) to strike on Friday. Tomorrow conductors and drivers in the Achterhoek Rivierenland, Twente and Limburg regions will stop working.
According to trade unions FNV and CNV, there will be work interruptions today and tomorrow, especially for bus drivers, who often work for Qbuzz in Drenthe. This week will be followed by thirteen more strike days, spread over several weeks, as these unions announced last week.
The new work interruptions are a follow-up to a wave of strikes that has started since the autumn of 2022 after negotiations on a new collective labor agreement reached an impasse. For the collective labor agreement, which covers about 13,000 employees and bus drivers in particular, FNV and CNV demand a wage increase of almost seventeen percent over a year and a wage increase of fourteen percent spread over eighteen months.
In addition, the negotiations on the smaller ‘multimodal’ collective labor agreement, which mainly involves train personnel from, for example, Arriva and Keolis, have stalled. According to the trade unions, they must also earn more in the new collective labor agreement to be concluded.
Employers find the wage demands of the unions too much and say they cannot afford the increases. They also point out that margins in public transport are small and many companies have been losing money since corona.