Hardly signed, the collective agreement which provides for a 4.2% wage increase in two steps for the 3.6 million workers in the metal and electronic sectors (see our dispatch No. 080888) is already questioned. According to the Bildzeitung newspaper of November 14, several companies going through a crisis, including Opel, thought about not increasing their employees' wages or about doing it later. The day the collective agreement was signed, the Infineon Company announced that it was leaving the employers' organization to avoid applying it. (Ref. 080897)
Interviewed by Planet Labor, an Opel spokesman partly denied these rumors, explaining that the company was a member of the employers’ organization which bargained for the collective agreement and that, because of that, it had to enforce it. But he reminded that Opel’s management and works council agreed, in a company agreement entitled “agreement for the future”, signed during the 2005 restructuring, to apply sectoral collective agreements cutting one point. “With this company agreement, employ
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