It took more than 130 years for a woman to reach the top of IG Metall. The new boss Christiane Benner sees herself as part of a team.
For the first time, IG Metall is led by a woman. At the union conference in Frankfurt on Monday, the delegates elected the previous vice-chairwoman Christiane Benner as first chairwoman for four years. The 55-year-old sociologist received 96.4 percent approval, as the electoral commission reported.
Benner’s predecessor Jörg Hofmann (67) did not run again after two terms in office for reasons of age. In their 132-year history, IG Metall and its predecessor organizations have only had male chairmen. One of the first to congratulate was the head of the German Federation of Trade Unions, Yasmin Fahimi.
Christiane Benner wants to make employee concerns more visible
Benner improved her previous election result from 2019 in Nuremberg of 87 percent by almost ten points. “Our industry needs to be developed, not liquidated,” she said in her application speech. IG Metall wants to lead them more as a team and make the concerns of employees more visible.
Together with the new boss, four other metal workers should stand for election as executive board members one after the other. The previous chief cashier Jürgen Kerner wanted to become second chairman. Like the social politician Hans-Jürgen Urban, he was already a member of the previous board.
The previous Stuttgart representative Nadine Boguslawski and Ralf Reinstädtler, who previously headed the Homburg-Saarpfalz office, are running for the first time. According to the board’s nomination, the 45-year-old Boguslawski is intended to be the main cashier. There were initially no candidates opposing this team of five.
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IG Metall: Germany’s largest and most influential union
This means that the top management of Germany’s largest and most influential union with 2.1 million members will be reduced by two people. For this purpose, the statutes were changed with a two-thirds majority before the elections. The stipulation that there must be at least one woman among the two chairmen was also newly anchored. IG Metall has a proportion of women of less than 20 percent. At the union conference, 142 of the 421 delegates were female; the statutory quota was significantly exceeded at around 34 percent.
Around 540 applications are expected to be discussed at the meeting up to and including Thursday (October 26). According to the board’s fundamental proposal, one of the issues will be the demand for a 32-hour week, as is already being done in the steel industry. The union wants to attract skilled workers through, among other things, a training guarantee for young people and more socially acceptable working conditions.
Benner has announced a keynote speech for this Tuesday. On this day, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) is also expected in the Frankfurt exhibition hall. The union expects him to give a clear statement on the bridge electricity price for particularly energy-intensive industries such as steel or chemicals.
Source: Stern
