From Monday, employees at the Virchow Clinic in Berlin-Wedding will have to face high additional costs if they drive to work.
The previously free parking spaces around the Charité campus belong to the new parking zone 77, for which two euros per hour will then be charged. Full-time employees would have to reckon with 360 euros a month, says Alexander Eichholtz from the hospital staff council. Many of the 1,500 nursing staff at the site could not afford this additional burden and were considering resigning.
Midwife Marion Kirch (name changed), who has worked for the Charité since 1983 and moved to Virchow in 2004, is annoyed by instructions that she and her colleagues should cycle or use local public transport. Because the 57-year-old works in alternating shifts: early, late and at night.
For many, without their own car, this means traveling late on subway lines such as the U8, on which acts of violence occur again and again. Or having to walk past lonely places like the Wuhletal train station, in the vicinity of which a woman was murdered in 2015. A problem that particularly affects shift workers with apartments outside the S-Bahn ring, says Kirch. “A colleague from the Märkisches Viertel walks 15 minutes to the bus, which only comes every 20 minutes at night.”
Even employees from the catchment area cannot always cope with work and family life without the car. A single parent from Moabit with two children of daycare age could not get to the early shift on time without her car.
As early as May, the Senate had agreed in principle to abolish parking fees for employees working rotating shifts. This applies to employees of the police, public order office and fire brigade. An application to the responsible district office should be enough, but employees at the Virchow Clinic have so far only received rejections, as Alexander Eichholtz confirms.
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The Mitte district demands, among other things, a shift start before 5:30 a.m. When asked, the district office points out that this rule should be revised at Senate level.
However, the district apparently has fundamental doubts about the legality of the exception rule. After the husband of a nurse complained to the district, the public order office replied by email: The planned new regulation for the public service “contradicts the principle of equal treatment (Article 3 of the Basic Law) from the point of view of the central public order office”.
The Clinic Council expects problems at the Virchow Clinic, even if only a few employees per station should resign. The situation is already tense. Just last year, nurses in the state-owned clinics had demanded higher staff ratios in the often understaffed wards. After the strike, the Charité spent a lot of money to recruit new specialists. Those efforts are now being frustrated simply because the Senate wants to oust cars from downtown “for ideological reasons.”
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“The interior senator and transport senator have announced the exception to the public and must follow their words with action,” criticizes Benjamin Jendro, spokesman for the police union (GdP). It cannot be “that people who work shifts for this city, keep the infrastructure running 24 hours a day and are dependent on the car, inserting coins every day”.
“Fair distribution of space needs parking space management,” confirmed Berlin’s Greens parliamentary group leader Silke Gebel of her party’s stance. However, this would also mean relieving shift workers.
A social solution is being worked out by Transport Senator Bettina Jarasch (Greens) and should be implemented promptly. On Friday, Jarasch wants to negotiate with Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD), and representatives of the hospitals should also be at the table.
