Cologne (dpa / lnw) - The Cologne Regional Labor Court has also ruled that calls for strikes by the Verdi union at the Bonn University Hospital are permissible. The court, headed by deputy presiding judge Ralf Weyergraf, rejected the clinic's appeal after a seven-hour session, the court announced on Friday.
The court thus confirmed the judgment of the Bonn Labor Court of June 14th. The judges in Bonn had already rejected an application by the hospital for an injunction in summary legal protection proceedings. The clinic management wanted to have the strikes of the employees prohibited by means of an injunction - and appealed after the failure.
With the strikes, Verdi and the employees of six university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia have been putting pressure on in negotiations with employers for a so-called collective agreement for nine weeks, in which precise staffing levels for individual areas of the hospitals are to be regulated.
According to the court, the strikers' claims are well founded. The employer side can adjust to how they react to the formulated collective bargaining targets in order to avoid a labor dispute. According to the first judgment, care for the patients is secured by the emergency service agreements with the clinics.
In addition, the parties agreed on emergency care "in a constructive manner" during the negotiations on Thursday, in which they improved the quality and quantity of emergency care, among other things, by increasing the minimum number of operating theaters from 16 to 25, along with the appropriate specialist staff. The strikes are also currently considered to be proportionate, and there has been no violation of the contractual peace obligation on the part of the trade union and the strikers during the ongoing negotiations.
