Collective bargaining negotiations begin for 132,000 employees

The first round of negotiations for a new collective agreement (KV) for the 60,000 employees in the electrical and electronics industry and the 8,000 employees in the paper industry marks the start of the spring wage round for more than 132,000 industrial employees today. A week later, on March 19, the textile industry negotiators began talks (7,500 workers). This will be followed on April 4th by Austria’s third largest industrial sector, the chemical industry, with 50,000 employees. The glass industry with around 7,000 employees will conclude the spring round in May.

The Pro-Ge and GPA unions had already put down stakes in the previous week: for them, annual inflation of 6.8 percent continues to be the basis for negotiations. The aim is to achieve a percentage increase in wages and salaries instead of one-off payments. These would only have a short-term effect. They rebuffed the employer representatives who wanted to move away from the “Benya formula”, i.e. increasing incomes based on inflation and increased productivity: “We won’t play that,” said the chief negotiators on the employee side, Reinhold Binder and Karl Dürtscher .