The food and drink sector produces more than 15% of manufacture value added (1.7% of total national GDP) and employs around 2.5% of the total number of employed. Collective bargaining exists only at company level. By rough estimation, not more than 15% of workers are covered by company-level collective agreements. The main reason for this is disharmony between representativeness of workers and employers. Employees are represented by two trade unions, both including workers from outside the food and drink sector. Employers are represented by more than 20 organisations. The majority of them are convinced that company-level collective bargaining is sufficient and sector-level bargaining is not needed. This is why problems relating to representativeness in the food and drink sector are neither raised nor discussed.
English: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/studies ...
For more information, please contact the editor Jan Cremers, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl or the communications officer at the ETUI, Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net.