Three days of strike at the Union Relief Organization: Why the CDU is blocking its own social policy

For three days, from September 9th to 11th, 2026, employees of the Unionhilfswerk (UHW) in Berlin stopped work. Ver.di Berlin-Brandenburg and GEW Berlin had called for a strike after the management of the social provider refused to start collective bargaining for months. On September 10th, the strikers marched from the CDU party headquarters, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, to the House of Representatives, where the last plenary session before the Berlin election took place that day. There they handed over an open letter to parliamentary group leaders and top candidates from the CDU, SPD, Greens and Left.

What sets this industrial dispute above the umpteenth collective bargaining dispute in the social sector is the personnel at the top: the chairman of the UHW, Michael Dietmann, also sits for the CDU in the House of Representatives. The UHW board is dominated by CDU members - the party that explicitly committed itself to strengthening collective bargaining in the Berlin coalition agreement. You don't have to use any imagination to see how these two facts fit together: not at all. Anyone who publicly promises to strengthen collective bargaining and at the same time as the boss of the employer has refused to negotiate for months does not have a communication problem, but rather a function. For these people, social policy is a Sunday speech, not a practice.

According to ver.di, management's attempt to position the works council against its own workforce is particularly cynical - they want to conclude a remuneration agreement directly with the BR, even though works councils are not authorized to negotiate wage levels. At the same time, there are rumors internally that the works council is blocking wage increases. This is a well-known pattern: If you can't divide the workforce, you split off your elected representatives from them and let them blame each other, while the real recipient of the anger - management itself - disappears from view.

The strike is part of a longer history: there were one-day warning strikes at the UHW on June 8th and July 2nd, 2026. The fact that the unions are now escalating to three days and are deliberately taking the protest to the CDU headquarters is not a coincidence, but a clear statement: If a party takes up the cause of the welfare state, but lets its own people in the social sector's management echelons block any improvement, then that is a political statement - and deserves a political response right on the doorstep.

For us as anti-fascists, this is not a niche topic. Precarious social and care work disproportionately affects women, migrant people and those who have the least negotiating power anyway. Anyone who blocks collective agreements produces exactly the uncertainty and exhaustion in which right-wing offers of “order” and “strong hand” grow. Class struggle from below – even the unspectacular, three-day strike at a social institution – is a building block against the shift to the right, not a diversionary tactic from it.

Sources

ver.di Berlin-Brandenburg press release, September 7, 2026