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BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Millions of German citizens must be prepared for letters and parcels to arrive late in the coming days. The Verdi trade union is calling on employees at all Deutsche Post letter and parcel centers nationwide to stage warning strikes starting at 5 p.m. Thursday and all day Friday after the second round of collective bargaining for some 160,000 postal workers ended without a result. "More strikes will follow in the following days," Verdi announced.

The union is demanding 15 percent more pay. The majority of Verdi members at the Post have low incomes and cannot cope with real wage losses, said negotiator Andrea Kocsis. Around 140,000 of the 160,000 pay-scale employees earn between 2108 and 3090 euros a month. They would be hit particularly hard by high inflation, as they would have to use a large part of their income for food and energy. The last tariff increase in January 2022 was only 2 percent.

Verdi therefore considers the demands "necessary, fair and feasible." But the company showed no understanding for the employees' situation, he said. "The employers have made it very clear that they are not prepared to compensate for the loss of real wages and inflation," Kocsis said. This is a provocation, she said, given the group's billions in profits. "The employees in the plants will now give a clear answer to this and lend weight to their demands with strikes."

The Post Board had already rejected the demand as unrealistic before the latest round of negotiations. A spokesman stressed that the company had made concrete proposals to Verdi in the collective bargaining talks, which were primarily about the building blocks and structure of the wage increases. However, it had also been made clear "that the union assumption that wage increases can be passed on through price increases does not apply in the coming years due to the comprehensive price regulation for the mail and parcel business in Germany."

Deutsche Post spoke of constructive discussions. It said this would create the basis for presenting "an offer that will be based on a fair balance between the justified interests of the employees and the economic realities of Post & Paket Deutschland" in the already agreed third round of negotiations on February 8 and 9.

Even without strikes, there had recently been many complaints about delivery shortcomings. Last year, the Federal Network Agency's Postal Complaints Office registered more complaints than ever before - a total of around 43,500, almost three times as many as in 2021. The complaints are directed at the entire German mail and parcel industry. However, most of the verbal complaints about delayed or lost shipments relate to the market leader Deutsche Post.

The company itself speaks of local problems, which it justifies with a high level of sick leave and with the generally difficult search for workers. A company spokesman said just a few days ago that this year they would "do everything in their power to further improve quality in delivery despite the continuing challenging circumstances."/rea/DP/mis