Metal and electrical industry: Metal tariff: Bavaria and the coast should find a solution

In the collective bargaining dispute in the metal and electrical industry, a comparatively quick agreement was reached after the first week of warning strikes. The board of IG Metall has commissioned the two districts of Bavaria and the Coast to find a solution together. The third round of negotiations with employers there was much more cooperative than in the other collective bargaining areas.

For the fourth round of negotiations, the new union leader Christiane Benner is planning something new, namely joint negotiations between both districts on November 11th in Hamburg. The employers did not initially comment on this proposal. Benner says of the negotiations so far: “We rate the intensity and seriousness of the talks in North and South as positive.”

The union announces that the warning strikes will continue for the time being. They are still too far apart on the question of wage increases. Negotiations are taking place for around 3.9 million employees nationwide. According to union information, around 216,000 employees took part in actions in around 1,000 companies in the four days since the end of the peace obligation.

This brings two districts to the fore in the metal industry’s federal collective bargaining system, which have rarely (Bavaria) or never (Coast) negotiated a pilot agreement since unification in 1990, which was then adopted by the other collective bargaining areas. A breakthrough was last achieved in Bavaria in 2013. Since then, Baden-Württemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia have alternated.

The union on the coast last made collective bargaining history in 1956/57: At that time, the metal workers, especially in the shipyards, which were flourishing at the time, fought for the introduction of continued payment of wages in the event of illness, including for workers, with a strike that lasted 114 days.

After the third round on Wednesday in Munich, the Bavarian IG Metall boss Horst Ott and the employer negotiator Angelique Renkhoff-Mücke reported progress on structural issues and announced further exploratory talks. Unusual: The negotiators from the coastal collective bargaining district, Daniel Friedrich from IG Metall and Lena Ströbele from Nordmetall, were also present at the Bavarian negotiations. They had also reported convergence, for example when assessing the economic situation.

Renkhoff-Mücke was already involved in the last pilot agreement in Bavaria in 2013 as the employers’ negotiator.

With almost 180,000 members, the Coast district is one of the medium-sized units of IG Metall and includes the states of Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Hamburg, Bremen and northwestern Lower Saxony.

IG Metall is demanding seven percent more wages for the 3.9 million employees nationwide for a contract term of one year. So far, after nine months of zero, employers are offering a tariff increase of 1.7 percent from July 2025 and a further 1.9 percent from July 2026, with a contract term of 27 months.