Collective Bargaining

Employers' organisation UEL wants the government to withdraw current plans for a reform of staff representation under a new labour law. According to the UEL the law would not lead to a better representation of staff and improved dialogue between employees and employers. Instead, it would give unions increased powers within businesses. The reform foresees a restructuring of staff delegations, such as the abolition of the joint works council, which brings together workers and employer representatives. The staff delegation, which does not include the employer, would get more power and more members, which will be able to get more paid hours of leave to fulfil their duties representing staff. The possibility for staff delegations to invite external consultants, including unionists, at the company's expense would increase.
English: http://www.wort.lu/en/view/business-union-objects-to-new-labour-law ...
French (UEL-statement): http://www.uel.lu/images/stories ...

Data from the Federal Employment Agency (BA) indicate that the number of people unable to make ends meet with their wages is increasing steadily. In 2012, a total of 323,000 households in the country was receiving top-up benefits from the welfare state despite having a regular gross monthly income of over ?800. The overwhelming proportion of workers affected worked in the retail sector as well as in the health and social services industries.
English: http://www.dw.de/increasing-number-of-germans-unable-to-live-off-their-jobs ...

The food and drink sector produces more than 15% of manufacture value added (1.7% of total national GDP) and employs around 2.5% of the total number of employed. Collective bargaining exists only at company level. By rough estimation, not more than 15% of workers are covered by company-level collective agreements. The main reason for this is disharmony between representativeness of workers and employers. Employees are represented by two trade unions, both including workers from outside the food and drink sector. Employers are represented by more than 20 organisations. The majority of them are convinced that company-level collective bargaining is sufficient and sector-level bargaining is not needed. This is why problems relating to representativeness in the food and drink sector are neither raised nor discussed.
English: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/studies ...

Youth guarantees programmes can help keep youth connected to the labour market by boosting skills and giving them support to find jobs. An ILO-video on YouTube illustrates the Swedish initiatives in this area.
English: http://www.youtube.com/watch ...

Experts from the three trade union confederations (Akava, SAK, STTK) have delivered harsh criticism to the EU for repeatedly breaching the freedom of collective bargaining. They refer to recent cases where the European Commission has intervened in the bargaining procedures in Romania, Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy and weakened the position of unions. Next to full respect for the autonomy of labour market organisations the experts want a stronger role for labour market organisations in the process where euro zone's economic policy is formulated.
English: http://www.artto.kaapeli.fi/unions/T2013/q18

An interesting Column of the Global Labour University provides a historical analysis of the socio-economic development. The country was one the fastest growing industrialised European countries between 1950 and 1990, partly due to low wages which helped competitiveness. The economic landscape was marked by the presence of a few major enterprises (including Fiat, Pirelli, Olivetti) and big state-owned enterprises (Ansaldo-Breda, Fin-cantieri, Eni, Enel, etc.) that provided long-term investment and innovation, facilitating the emergence of plenty of successful SMEs. Nowadays the country suffers a huge lack of long-term investment, especially after implementing austerity measures, and a very high rate of unemployment. The way out of the crisis is through fair taxation (of the resources accumulated in private wealth), an end to the fixation on state deficits, more priority to investment and a (German) wage-led increased demand.
English: http://www.global-labour-university.org ...

The manufacture of food products and beverages has traditionally played a fairly important role in the economy. The sector contributes around 4% of the GDP and employs about 5% of the workforce. Although the sector has several employer associations, none of them has taken the role of the employer or participated in collective bargaining at sectoral level. There is one strong sectoral trade union - the LMP - joining more than 20 large enterprises in the food and drink sector. Collective bargaining coverage in the sector might be equal to approximately 25%.
English: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/eiro/studies ...

Lufthansa has agreed an inflation-busting pay settlement, ending a dispute which had threatened to drive travellers towards rival fliers. While the airline agreed to raise pay by up to 4.7% for cabin crew and ground staff (33,000 employees), a possible new round of strikes looms as pilots' union Cockpit demands the carrier respond to its own 4.6% wage rise proposals by the middle of this month.
English: http://www.aviationpros.com/news/10932810/lufthansa-agrees-to-47-percent-raises ...

The job search magazines Jobat and Vacature carried out job satisfaction surveys in 2012 with very similar findings. The average gross monthly wage in 2012 was ?3,133 (Vacature survey) and ?3,180 (Jobat). Half of the respondents earned ?2,800 or less. About 80% of employees received a 13th month bonus, while about 1% also received a 14th month bonus. On average, workers had 28 holidays a year. For most employees (63%), any pay increase was restricted to the national automatic index-linked rise.
English: http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/ewco/2013/02/BE ...

The bank Soci‚t‚ G‚n‚rale has planned a new-cost cutting drive that would result in hundreds of job losses, as its first-quarter net income fell sharply. The planned 900 million euros of cost reductions through 2015, add up to the 550 million euros of cuts of 2012. The bank says that it is in talks with the unions about eliminating 600 to 700 jobs at its headquarters, but added that there would be `no forced layoffs'.
English: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/societe-generale-announces-new-cuts ...