Coronavirus, covid-19 | Stop the dangerous bus strike before it reaches the whole country starting tomorrow

A dangerous strike is taking place, and the Storting and the government have no problem stopping the strike with a forced salary board on the grounds that it threatens life and safety.

The Salary Board means that the strike must end and the salary is determined by the independent National Salary Board. At the moment, bus drivers are expected to receive a 1.7 percent pay increase, as others in society have received.

In fact, it is very good in a year in which coronary heart disease and Covid-19 disease have sent more than 200,000 to unemployment, many are laid off and others feel that the companies they work for are threatened with bankruptcy and closure. .

The fact is that bus drivers are on strike even though the industry has received 4.6 billion crowns from society to keep the wheels moving. Without this support, drivers would go on strike against employers who could go bankrupt. If the requirements are met, the crown’s support of society will indirectly go to higher wage growth than everyone else’s.

Bus drivers must agree that the long-term requirement to earn the same pay as (less and less) industrial workers will take time, and that the crown year 2020 is an exceptional year. This should be a matter of course in a period when infection is on the rise again and all of Oslo is the so-called red zone.

It is strange that the health authorities have not already raised the alarm when there are reports of crowded trams, where people remain together without bandages. If anything the Folkeinstituttet has told us about infected voices, crowded trams and subways obviously increase the risk of infection.

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health believes that infection is increasing in Norway, the number of confirmed infected people is increasing, and in Oslo there is relatively great concern about the situation.

Statistics from the Oslo Municipality Health Service show strong growth in established covid 19 cases that have accelerated during the bus strike.

The absurd thing is that while it is forbidden to have more than 10 guests in your own home, you allow a strike where dozens of strangers – and unregistered – stand like herring in a barrel on the tram and subway and do a later. Infection tracking impossible.

In public debate, some people claim that the goal of a strike is to hit a third person. That, of course, is completely wrong. A labor dispute must affect the employer.

In a private company, the will to strike is clouded by the fact that employees know that a conflict threatens the company and, in the worst case, the employees themselves in the next round. There is also the threshold to hit high.

In the public sector, employers save on wage costs, strikers receive strike contributions from LO, and no jobs are at risk. The only ones affected by the bus conflict are innocent third parties, such as schoolchildren, patients on the way to the hospital and all those who have to go to work.

NOK 4.6 billion state support goes to county municipalities, which distribute the money to transportation companies in compensation for missing ticket revenue. Without this money, many of the companies would have been threatened with bankruptcy.

So far, the bus strike has affected much of eastern Norway, but it will intensify from Saturday. Bus drivers in Vestland, Trøndelag, Rogaland and Finnmark will be eliminated in the new strike. In addition, large parts of Nordland and Kristiansand will be eliminated, according to employee organizations.

The seas: Employees warn of escalation

The strike is a human right, it is argued. And that is correct. But it is also deaf to emphasize in a period when we all lose the right to move freely, go to work, go to the classroom or invite people home. The right of assembly is temporarily limited, grassroots sport is paralyzed, in short, the entire society accepts the state of emergency to avoid a new wave of infections and a new hundred hospitalizations and deaths.

The trade union movement believes it is heavier to raise wages by 1.7 percent than to accept a kind of moral obligation of peace in a life-threatening pandemic period. Health authorities and political authorities should not accept this. The answer is to let the agreement reach an independent court and end the strike before it becomes a national and even more dangerous situation.

P.S! What do you mean? Is it time to stop the bus strike, or do you think the strikers should be allowed to continue as long as they want? Write a reader letter!