Area collective agreement in some sectors a phased-out model


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Status: 05/09/2023 11:17 a.m

The collective wage agreement, a successful model of the social market economy, is 150 years old. But the industry that won it, of all things, is doing worse than ever: the printing industry.

It must have been a proud day for printers in Germany, May 9, 1873. Germany got its first collective agreement – and a piece of social peace. A great victory for the printers, who had just formed the first union in the country. This was preceded by strikes, lockouts, layoffs and imprisonments.

Of course, such an anniversary is acknowledged accordingly. The Hans Böckler Foundation invites you to the ceremony with Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, ver.di boss Frank Werneke and Steffen Kampeter, managing director of the employers’ associations. There will be celebrations in the Berlin Turbinenhalle: a former industrial site.

Weekly offers and advertisements framed by local news – advertising papers have long made good sales with this mixture.
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former flagship industry printing industry

“Former” is a word that also fits quite well to the collective bargaining agreement in the industry in which the area collective agreement was “invented”. Because in recent years the printer industry has experienced a veritable “tariff flight”.

Bertram Strausberg is Managing Director of Axel Springer Print Management GmbH. The company prints the “Bild” and other Springer newspapers. The company operates three print shops in Germany – for now. Stausberg is on the employers’ side, but is clearly in favor of collective agreements. “In principle, I think collective agreements are a very good thing. They ensure that all market participants have the same competitive conditions – if everyone participates. That makes a lot of sense,” he says.

But not everyone is doing it anymore. Stausberg paints a rather gloomy picture of the industry in which he has been working since 1996: Fewer and fewer people read newspapers, magazines or catalogs on paper. The cake of orders to be distributed is getting smaller every year. “In a declining market, as we are experiencing in many segments of the printing industry, there is enormous competitive pressure and therefore also cost pressure. This is one of the reasons why many print shops have fled the collective agreement in recent years.”

“Like a 150 year old chest of drawers”

A further aggravating factor is that many of the provisions of the general collective agreement in the industry have not been modernized for years. The works council chairman of the Spandau printing company, Sven Rieck, criticizes this. The print shop belongs to the Springer Group. Rieck is one of those who are still paid according to the collective agreement. On the one hand, he’s happy about it, but he’s not particularly optimistic either: “150 years of collective agreement is really good. But it’s like a 150-year-old chest of drawers. You could actually polish it up again.”

The rules are getting old. Although there are sometimes very decent surcharges for night and holiday work, there are huge gaps in other areas. Rieck, born in 1972, complains: “I’ve been working in shifts since I was seventeen. Part-time work arrangements in order to get a good pension are not regulated in the collective wage agreement, for example. But the majority of colleagues would like that.”

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Many rules have remained unchanged for decades

His managing director Stausberg also says: “The wage agreement in the printing industry is in part no longer up to date.” By that he means above all regulations that determine how many employees have to work on a printing press. The regulations have remained unchanged for decades. “Especially for modern printing machines with a high degree of automation, these so-called staffing rules border on regulations for employing a stoker on an electric locomotive,” says Stausberg.

For years there have been repeated attempts to modernize the collective wage agreement for the printing industry. But so far all attempts have failed, the last one just a few weeks ago. The set of rules threatens to degenerate into a relic. Works council member Rieck says dryly: “I doubt whether I will still be able to push through fundamental changes in a collective agreement that many employers are canceling.”

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Utilization expected to continue to fall

The question would also be how many employees are likely to benefit from this in the future. An industry in decline hardly needs new recruits. Although the job has become easier overall thanks to the automation, Rieck also says: “The average age in our three print shops is very high, one almost speaks of supervised printing.” 150 years after the workers’ hard-fought success, it seems more than questionable whether the set of rules will survive the next century and a half.

“The utilization of the print shops is likely to fall by around five to ten percent per year in the coming years,” predicts Managing Director Stausberg. This also has consequences for his company. For technical reasons, investments worth millions would have to be made in one of the three printing plants in the near future. In view of the declining circulation figures, this makes little sense. The result: the Ahrensburg print shop is scheduled to close in the second half of 2024. The orders will then take over the remaining two locations.

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