Germany - Ver.di aims at 5% improvement for public sector workers - December 20, 2009

The local and federal government collective bargaining committee of the ver.di union met on 15 December to confirm its claim in the lead up to negotiations that begin on 13 February. Ver.di will be negotiating with the police (GdP), teachers (GEW) and civil service union (dbb tarifunion) on behalf of nearly two million workers in local and federal government. The main demand will be for a real increase in pay plus a number of other measures including provision of shorter working hours for older workers to create more jobs for younger workers and commitments to take on more apprentices, totaling a 5% increase. There will also be demands relevant to particular groups of workers such as better on-call and overtime payments for hospital employees. WSI, the research institute in the Hans Böckler Foundation, also on 15 December issued a report noting that nominal pay increases in the public services have amounted to around 17% since 2000, below the 21.4% increase recorded across the economy as a whole.
On 20 December, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said to see "no scope"
to pay ver.di's wage claim and to be "shocked" by the demand.

English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/331;
 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=az2s_V_wgMRw

German: http://presse.verdi.de/pressemitteilungen/showNews?id .;
  http://www.boeckler.de/pdf/pm_ta_2009_12_15.pdf

This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter, which presents up-to-date information on collective bargaining developments across Europe. 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 2009. All rights reserved. The ETUI is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. The ETUI is financially supported by the European Community. The European Community is not responsible for any use made of the information contained in this news section.