Transcript
Imagine you pay for a gym membership. Every month, automatically, the money leaves your account. Then one morning you show up and the doors are locked. Not because the gym went bankrupt. Not because there was a fire. But because the staff decided today was a good day to make a point — to management, to the city, to whoever was supposed to be listening. And you? You just paid for a service you cannot use. And nobody owes you anything.
That is exactly what happened recently in Cologne. KVB, the city's public transportation network, went on strike — supported by ver.di. And here is the part that should make you stop and think: most people who use KVB have a Deutschlandticket. A monthly flat rate. Already paid. Non-refundable. The buses and trains stopped running, the passengers couldn't get to work, pupils couldn't get to school — and KVB itself? KVB saved money that day. No drivers working means no wages paid that day. No buses running means no fuel consumed, no electricity used. The company came out of the strike day financially better off than a normal operating day. The workers made their point. And the only people who actually bled were the customers.
That is what I want to talk about today. Not whether unions should exist. They should. But whether we are honest about who actually pays the price when they go on strike.
Unions Matter. Context Matters More.
Let me be direct about where I stand, because this conversation gets derailed very quickly when people assume the worst.
Unions were one of the most important inventions of the industrial age. When workers had no legal protection, no leverage, and no voice — when twelve-hour shifts were standard, when safety equipment was optional, when you could be dismissed on a whim — collective bargaining was not just useful. It was necessary. It changed the material conditions of millions of people's lives. I do not dispute that history, and I do not want to erase it.
But we are not in 1890. We are not in a world where workers have no rights, no recourse, no legal framework protecting them. Those protections exist. They were hard won, and they are now encoded in law. The baseline was secured — by earlier generations of union members, yes, and by decades of legislation that followed.
So the question is not whether unions should exist. The question is whether every union, in every industry, using the same blunt instrument that made sense in a factory in the Ruhr valley a hundred years ago, is still serving the people it claims to represent. And increasingly, the answer is no.
When the War Has Nothing to Do With the Workers
Here is an example I want you to hold in your mind.
A few years ago — around 2014, 2015 — German rail passengers experienced something remarkable. Repeated strikes. Disruption after disruption. Trains cancelled, commutes destroyed, freight delayed. But if you looked closely at what was actually happening, it was not a dispute between workers and management in any meaningful sense. It was a war between two union leaders over territory. Over who got to represent which staff. Over power structures and organizational turf.
The commuters standing on empty platforms had nothing to do with that fight. The workers themselves — the actual drivers, the actual station staff — were pieces on a board being moved around by people whose primary interest was their own institutional relevance.
That is the version of unions nobody wants to talk about. Unions do not only exist for their members. They also exist for themselves. They have hierarchies, they have politics, they have leaders with careers and egos and competitive instincts. And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — what looks like a fight for workers' rights is actually a fight for the union's position. The workers are the justification. The commuters are the collateral. And the leaders are the ones with something real to gain.
The Wrong Target
Back to the core problem. In service industries — and I mean any industry where the product is a service delivered directly to people — going on strike does not hit the employer the way it hits a manufacturer.
If workers at a chemical plant or a steel mill walk out, production stops. The company cannot deliver. The company loses revenue directly and immediately. There is a straight line between the dispute and the financial pain. That is how the strike weapon was designed to work. That is the logic behind it.
But when KVB drivers walk out, KVB does not lose revenue. The Deutschlandticket money has already been collected. The monthly subscribers already paid. KVB loses nothing. In fact, as I said, they save operational costs. The employer is barely inconvenienced. The customers — who have no part in the dispute, who have no union of their own, who cannot easily switch to another provider because there is no other provider — they absorb everything.
And yet, unions will stand in front of a camera and say: we are not targeting the customers. This strike is aimed at the employer.
I understand why they say it. But it is not true. And they know it is not true. If you knowingly deploy a weapon that lands on a specific group of people, and then you claim you are not targeting that group — that is not a communications strategy. That is hypocrisy. There are smarter ways to apply pressure. More creative ways to hit the employer without shutting down the service entirely. I am not going to pretend there is an easy solution — there isn't. But the fact that unions rarely even look for one tells you something. The sledgehammer is their preferred tool not because it is the most precise, but because it is the most powerful. And powerful tools are addictive when you face no accountability for the damage they cause.
The Reliability Problem Nobody Addresses
Here is what makes the KVB situation even more difficult to defend. KVB is not a service that is running smoothly and efficiently and whose workers are being exploited despite excellent performance. KVB is already unreliable. Delays. Cancellations. Infrastructure failures. Passengers in Cologne have been dealing with a service that regularly underdelivers for years. The relationship between the company and its customers is already strained — not because of strikes, but because of chronic underperformance.
So when ver.di stands up and says these workers deserve higher wages, the ordinary passenger — sitting at a tram stop, waiting for a tram that may or may not show up, on a monthly ticket they already paid for — is not thinking about solidarity. They are thinking: higher wages for what exactly? For this?
That reaction is not anti-worker. It is the completely rational response of someone who is being asked to sympathize with a group whose performance they experience as inadequate, and who is simultaneously being asked to absorb the cost of that group's demands. You cannot divorce the wage negotiation from the service quality and expect the public to stay on your side. Trust is earned. And it is being spent.
The Spiral Nobody Wants to Name
And then there is the broader economic dimension that gets lost entirely in these conversations.
Higher wages are not free. In a private company, higher wages either compress margins or get passed on to customers through higher prices. In a publicly subsidized company like KVB, higher wages mean either more public subsidy — which means more tax — or higher ticket prices. Probably both over time.
And we are not operating in a vacuum. The war in the Middle East right now is pushing fuel prices up. Significantly more than previous crises did. Buses run on fuel. That is already pressure on the cost structure of every public transportation operator in Germany. Add political decisions like the Deutschlandticket — well-intentioned, but artificially suppressing prices in a way that is fiscally unsustainable — and you have companies being squeezed from multiple directions simultaneously.
In that environment, the union response is to push for higher wages. Those wages feed into prices. Higher prices reduce purchasing power. Reduced purchasing power produces the next round of wage demands. Nobody in this cycle stops to explain how inflation actually works. Nobody asks whether the wage increase today simply becomes the price increase next year. The argument is always emotional — hard-working people deserve adequate pay — and that is true as a moral statement. But it is incomplete as an economic one. Saying workers deserve more does not tell us where that money comes from. And pretending it comes from nowhere, or from the company's profits, is not honest.
Closing
I am not asking you to be against unions. I am asking you to stop treating them as permanently beyond question.
Every institution that was once necessary can become self-serving. Every tool that was once precise can be overused until it causes more damage than it solves. The strike was designed for a specific context — a power imbalance between an employer and a workforce, in an industry where shutting down production hurts the company directly. In that context, it works. It should exist.
But in service industries — where the customers are ordinary people who already paid, who have no alternative, who played no part in the dispute — it is the wrong weapon in the wrong place. And claiming otherwise, loudly and repeatedly, while knowing exactly where the pain lands, is not solidarity.
It is a lie people have agreed not to call a lie. The commuter who couldn't get to work last week deserves better than that. And frankly, so do the union members who are being used as justification for someone else's power struggle.
Think before you act. And the next time a union announces a strike in a service you depend on — before you nod along — ask yourself: who is actually getting hurt here? And who decided that was acceptable?
