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Strict demands for metal industry employees: Stefan Wolf, the president-designate of the Gesamtmetall employers association, wants employees to work overtime without full pay compensation. This could be “two or four hours a week,” Wolf said of the “Bild” newspaper. A rigid 35-hour week “no longer fits the times.” You want to “deviate flexibly, depending on the order situation.”
Wolf also wants to partially abolish late fees. These “are no longer up to date”. Special payments like Christmas bonuses and rest regulations should also be tested, he demanded. “If you listen to companies: a lot of people would be willing to make concessions,” he said, complaining that hourly labor costs in Germany were too high: “They are crushing companies. The threatening consequence is that companies migrate abroad and jobs are lost.
Stefan Wolf, so far with the employers’ association Südwest-Metall, is the director of the automotive supplier ElringKlinger and will be chosen to succeed Rainer Dulger at the top of the general metal level in November.
The German metal and electrical industry is slowly coming out of the low crown. Although the industry has taken a first step out of the crisis, “returning to the pre-crisis level will take longer than we expected,” Gesamtmetall CEO Oliver Zander said recently. In terms of production, the industry is roughly 19 percent below the previous year’s level in the first eight months. According to the Gesamtmetall survey, 72 percent of companies expect sales to decline in 2020, an average of 23 percent.
The union wants a four-day week with partial wages
Deep conflict threatens the next round of collective bargaining for the German metal and electrical industry. The industry with 3.9 million employees and the heavyweights of mechanical and automotive engineering is, on the one hand, in a violent structural change, driven by digitization and conversion to electric drives. On the other hand, companies are struggling with the consequences of the crown crisis to varying degrees.
In the first run-up to the difficult round of negotiations, the employers and IG Metall came up with vastly different recipes for the future. The union wants to fight for a flexible volume that would lead to a significant increase in employee wages in burgeoning companies. On the contrary, where things are not going so well, the workforce must be sent all or part of the work to four days.
To secure employment, there must be an election model for a four-day week with partial pay, NRW district chief Knut Giesler recently demanded. This also creates opportunities for urgently needed additional training: “Four work days and one qualification day are possible with this work time model.” 32 or even 28 hours a week could help some underutilized companies keep their workforce in better times. The big problem, however, is the partial wage compensation the union demands for failure.
“The pay increases are not realistic either this year or next,” Gesamtmetall boss Rainer Dulger said in mid-October, also asking employees to contribute to crisis management.
