During a press conference held in Frankfurt on 05 June, and on the occasion of the presentation of its ‘Transformation Atlas’, Germany’s IG Metall trade union has launched a ‘Red Alert’ over the fact that many businesses within the metallurgy and electro-technical sectors are unprepared for the digital transformation and electromobility. Almost half of them have no strategy, or a wholly inadequate strategy, and as such are putting the future of their staff into a ‘jobs lottery’, the trade union body warned. The data comes from the IG Metall’s ‘Transformation Atlas’; a study by the union of almost 2,000 companies that aimed to analyze the concrete impact of digital transformation within their businesses, the strategies the businesses have adopted and the measures they have already undertaken in terms of ongoing training and career changes. IG Metall has called on companies and government to take appropriate measures in order to avoid job losses and it has also proposed to introduce a new type of partial unemployment for workers impacted by transformation (called ‘Transformationskurzarbeitergeld’), along the lines of the measure Germany successfully implemented during the global financial and economic crisis in 2009.
Massive impact on employment. Over the course of many months IG Metall gathered datas from an exhaustive and extensive questionnaire it sent to the WCs and union representatives in almost 2,000 companies that cumulatively employ some 1.7 million staff. The goal was to gain an understanding of the situation within these companies in terms of digital transformation and climate change. The questions addressed concrete changes that have already been or intend to be undertaken, the strategy that has
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