According to a study published by the German Labor Market and Employment Research Institute (IAB) on October 9, 2008, only 52% of employees working in private firms in western Germany were still covered, in 2007, by sectoral collective agreements, against 66% in 1996. In eastern Germany, this rate even fell down from 48% to 33% during the same period. (Ref. 080795)
According to the IAB’s researchers in Nuremberg, this trend can be explained by two phenomena: more and more companies leave the employers’ organizations which regularly bargain for sectoral collective agreements with the trade unions. Besides, companies created recently are increasingly reluctant to sign these agreements. If we only count companies – not employees – bound by a collective agreement, the figures are even higher. Indeed, large businesses tend to sign collective agreements more th
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