After arm-wrestling for several weeks, and with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim joining the company’s capital in the background, the social partners at Telekom Austria agreed, on January 17, on the level of wage increases for 2014 for the company’s 9,100 Austria employees. For the first time since the company has become private, the management got the GPF postal and telecom union to agree to a different wage increase for employees and civil servants – 2.4% for the former and 1.55% for the latter. The inflation level used during the talks was 2.33%. The union eventually agreed to the difference to avoid a total pay freeze as requested by the management. In return, sizeable compensation was secured.
A recurring goal: cutting civil servants’ wage bill. The management of Telekom Austria, a former public monopoly that became a private company with a majority public shareholder in 1998 (entered the stock market in 2000), has been fighting for years to limit the wage bill and the number of employees who have kept their civil servant status after the privatization.
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