Tarifbewegung 2021 – Videopodcast Birgit Dietze Folge 2

Dear colleagues, last time we gave you a rough overview of the demands of the tariff movement in the metal and electrical industry this year. We want to use this video to go deeper into the four core demands that we have put forward in this tariff round. As you can see, we have summarized the demands in four central papers, numbers one, two, three, and four. Today we will go into more detail on the respective contents. You can download these papers from our homepage, igmetall-bbs.de. Demand number one in the metal and electrical industry this year amounts to a volume of four percent. What does that mean? It is to be paid into wages and employment security. Wages, on the one hand, you know that like a normal wage tariff round: an increase in the wage tables. The last increase was from April 2018, so more than two years ago. And our colleagues from the companies who have been running through the crisis tell us that it is necessary to increase the wage tables accordingly in this tariff round. On the other hand, we see concerns among employees regarding employment security, regarding the future and perspective, because there has been short-time work, because supply chains broke down during Corona, because the structural change is making employment more difficult in the future anyway. For these colleagues, we are considering: we need... For payment regulations, for example, in the collective agreement on short-time work, we might need a collective reduction in working time and thus collective wage loss. If working time is reduced, then part of the wage compensation so that the loss of earnings is not so great. These are two elements from the area of employment security. This volume that we want to spread over both areas is essentially the first demand. Number two: we call on the employers' associations to jointly create a collective framework for future-oriented collective agreements. What we see so far is that companies often come to us in crisis cycles. You know the pattern: a liquidity crisis, an innovation crisis, sometimes in reverse order, and so on. And the company is going downhill, and at some point the employers come to us and say, 'Union, how about it? Can we find a solution of some kind?' That is often too late to start and then develop solutions. What we see as IG Metall is that we face challenges from globalization, digitalization, and CO2 regulation poses major challenges, especially for production and products. We would like to address these structural challenges of the future much earlier with the employers. It's about securing locations, about investment, about sustainable products of the future, about employment security, possibly about protection against dismissal, about training and takeover. All these things, not individually. We don't want to go through them individually now, but we want to create a framework for such future-oriented collective agreements so that we as collective bargaining parties can start discussions earlier and look more closely at specific sectors. As demand number three, we call for the tariff equalization money. We are broadcasting today from Berlin, and I would like to give a Berlin example to explain what is behind it. We have a joint wage table for the city and for Brandenburg. For example, in wage group five, it's about 3,300 euros monthly wage. It applies to East Berlin and West Berlin. But in East Berlin, you work 38 hours per week for that, while in West Berlin only 35 hours per week. If we have a company like Siemens AG with locations there, it's simply unfair: at one location, you work three hours longer without pay, and that 30 years after reunification. Therefore, we are calling for this point again in this tariff round and want to finally take a step forward together with the employers. The fourth point in this tariff round: we call for an improvement in the takeover of trainees. You might ask, what about that? We already have indefinite takeover, but it's not unconditional for everyone. The existing collective agreement distinguishes between trainees trained according to demand and additional trainees trained beyond demand. It's important that training takes place in companies at all, no question. But we also need a follow-up perspective for the colleagues who have been trained. That's why we are making this demand. And for the companies that are not yet training, we would start there, saying: also train, because that's an investment in the future. I am very pleased that you have watched. I hope we have brought a bit more substance to the matter, and I look forward to you downloading the papers. Feel free to send us questions, and then I'd say, see you soon.