Companies with a collective agreement offer significantly better employment conditions than comparable companies without a collective agreement. For example, full-time employees in companies without a collective agreement work on average 54 minutes longer per week and still earn 11% less than employees in companies with a collective agreement, which do not differ from each other in terms of company size, economic sector, the qualification of the employees and the status of their technical systems. In times of sharply rising living costs, employees in companies covered by collective agreements therefore tend to have a small financial cushion. This is the result of a new study by the Economic and Social Science Institute (WSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation, in which the development of collective bargaining coverage in Germany is examined using new data from the representative IAB establishment panel.
Read on: in German…
For more information, please contact Paul de Beer or Oana Ciuca, De Burcht (Scientific Bureau for the Dutch Trade Union Movement) p.t.debeer@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Mehmet Koksal mkoksal@etui.org. For previous full issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit https://www.etui.org/Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter or consult the archive with all articles in our database at www.cbnarchive.eu.
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