Following a crisis meeting held on 26 January, the leadership of the IG Metall union announced that it would continue negotiations with the employer organisation in Baden-Württemberg, the most significant region for the metal sector, this evening. The decision came after a fourth round of negotiations ended in failure on Wednesday. Though the move provides brief respite from the dispute in the metal industry, the trade union's president, made no attempt to hide his scepticism on the outcome of the talks, which focus primarily on working time flexibility, and issued an ultimatum. IG Metall says that, if no agreement is agreed by midday on Saturday, it will organise 24-hour strikes as well as a vote on open-ended strikes in certain regions. Since the 'social peace' clause expired on 1 January, IG Metall has organised warning strikes on a national level, involving more than 960,000 workers in the metal industry.
Continued talks or an escalation of the conflict? Faced with these options, the leadership of the IG Metall union opted in extremis for the former. However, the spectre of further dispute is by no means out of the question. “I don’t want to hide the fact that our positions remain some way apart in some areas […] The result is far from certain,” said the president of the union, who is pushing for the right for 3.9 million metal sector workers to temporarily transition to a 28-hour working week,
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