Austria: metalworking industry employers call for postponement of collective bargaining

With the main collective bargaining in the Austrian economy – that of the metalworking industry – set to kick off on 24 September, Christian Knill, negotiator for FMTI, Metaltechnology Austria, the largest employer organisation in the sector, said on Monday 14 September that he would ask trade union partners, from the first meeting, to postpone the annual collective bargaining for a year. He said: “One thing is clear: there is nothing to redistribute this year. From a purely economic point of view, it would be more logical to postpone negotiations on wages until next year. We are in a state of absolute emergency and we need to respond to the crisis together.” To back up his stance, Knill pointed out that the current crisis is impacting the sector much more severely than the crisis of 2008-09, to the point of that it has endured the biggest decline in activity since the end of the Second World War. “The coronavirus crisis sets us back at least ten years. For 2021, we expect a production level equivalent to that of 2010,” Knill explained. For the first five months of the year, production was down 19.6%. Orders fell by 26.5% and exports declined by 15.8%. Finally, although the sector’s workforce (195,000 employees) has been afforded relative protection by short-time working measures, it nevertheless had shrunk by 4.1% at the end of May 2020. Knill says the use of short-time working has begun to decline, although 50% of companies in the sector are still making use of such measures.