When the buses stop: The SWEG strike shows who really keeps the business running

Since Wednesday, September 9, 2026, SWEG buses have been in depots in large parts of Baden-Württemberg. In Lahr, Offenburg, Kehl, Emmendingen, Weil am Rhein, Wiesloch, Sinsheim and a dozen other places, ver.di is calling on employees to go on a warning strike - and because the employers have shown no movement so far, the union has already announced that it will continue the strike next Monday and Tuesday. As is often the case in local public transport, it is about higher wages in the nationwide railway collective agreement - and about whether a company like SWEG can continue to refuse the collective bargaining agreement while the burden on transport services has been increasing for years.

The pattern is familiar, and it is not a coincidence. The nationwide local transport collective bargaining round in February 2026 had already shown how districts and municipalities have made a habit of sitting out negotiations in the hope that the workforce will give up at some point. They don't give up. What is noticeable this time: SWEG itself had expected greater impacts than actually occurred - an indication of how determined the employees are to build up pressure even without spectacular images. No bus runs, no camera needed.

Anyone who reads about strikes in the bourgeois media is usually served the perspective of commuters - anger at cancellations, recommendations to change trains, rarely the question of why it has to come to this at all. The answer is banal: employers in public transport calculate strikes as collateral damage that can be sat out as long as the actual cost issue - better shifts, higher supplements for night and weekend work, an end to chronic understaffing - remains unresolved. Every bus that fails is therefore not an industrial accident, but rather a price tag for the refusal to invest in the working conditions that keep traffic running in the first place.

The SWEG strike is not isolated. Ver.di Baden-Württemberg is calling for parallel protests against the federal government's planned social cuts, with a nationwide day of action on September 26th in 15 cities. The message is the same as at the bus depot: Anyone who cuts through or negotiates to the detriment of public services - whether local transport, clinics or the welfare state - will ultimately hit those who support them. As anti-fascists and leftists, our interest in these struggles is not an abstract one. An assertive, strike-capable public service is one of the few forms of counter-power that can counteract the authoritarian formation of the right - social cuts, law-and-order rhetoric, scapegoat politics. Where workforces are organized, the ground for right-wing narratives of the "lazy striker" or the "overtaxed administration" is thinner.

What counts now is solidarity that extends beyond your own depot: support the picket line, mark September 26th, and contradict the narrative that canceled buses are the real nuisance - and not the employers' years-long collective bargaining evasion that is forcing them.

Sources

ZEIT: Verdi warning strike in SWEG bus traffic is being expanded (September 9, 2026)
ver.di Baden-Württemberg: Press releases on the SWEG warning strike and action day on September 26th
ver.di: Local transport collective bargaining round – nationwide strikes in public transport (Feb. 2026)