November 15, 2011 - Visit at the picket of the striking workers of Charité Facility Management (CFM) in front of the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Berlin-Wedding.

It is the tenth week of their strike. A handful of CFM employees stand in front of the SPD headquarters day and night. They say that they have no collective agreement, that they all got hired with different conditions, and that their conditions are in general much worse and their wages much lower than those of the colleagues at the Charité-hospital. CFM was outsourced from Charité-hospital in 2006. Since then 51 percent of the company is owned by Charité, 49 percent by a consortium of Dussmann, VAMED, and Hellmann.

"In the past nearly three and a half years CFM has become a successful model of public-private partnerships. (...) Thanks to the international management experience of VAMED, Dussmann, and Hellmann CFM successfully simplified procedures and was able to use synergy effects. (...) That way the costs for Charité could be reduced while the demanded quality standards could be guaranteed. All in all, CFM has saved costs of 90 million Euros since 2006." (VAMED PR-text, 2009)

The striking workers call for a solidarity demonstration on Saturday, November 19, 2011: "Against Dumping - For Collective Agreements". The demonstration meets at S-Bahnhof Friedrichstraße at 10:30 a.m.