On Saturday 24 September, negotiations between Airbus and the IG Metall union on a collective agreement for 16,000 employees in Germany broke down. “After nearly 12 hours, the employers ended the negotiations. They remain inflexible on raising the productivity rate to 8% a year. We can’t demand that of our colleagues,” two of the IG Metall negotiators, Daniel Friedrich and Johann Dahnken, said in a statement. The failure to reach an agreement came as a surprise after a year and a half of efforts appeared to be about to come to fruition. The prospective agreement would cover a range of issues from an employment guarantee in the coming years to a ceiling on hiring temporary workers. In the new situation, the bargaining committee of IG Metall has decided to start warning strikes, covering the Airbus locations Hamburg, Bremen, Buxtehude and Stade.
English: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeq ...
German: http://www.igmetall.de/cps/rde/xchg/SID-1018C2B6 ...
This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Maarten van Klaveren, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2011.