When it comes to the wage dispute, the train drivers are currently claiming all their attention. In the shadow of the rail strike, however, another major wage round begins this week: that for the public service of the federal states. On Thursday the service union Verdi and the Beamtenbund (DBB) want to announce their claim for remuneration. The first negotiations will take place on October 8th. The problem: the employees point out the hardships caused by the pandemic – and the countries point out their strained households.
“We will not accept any real wage losses,” said DBB boss Ulrich Silberbach Süddeutsche Zeitung. “The inflation rate is rising, our colleagues from the countries have done an excellent job in the corona crisis. They will not foot the bill for the pandemic alone and shoulder the budgetary restructuring by sacrificing income.” Lower Saxony’s finance minister, Reinhold Hilbers (CDU), who negotiates for the collective bargaining community of the federal states (TdL), on the other hand, tries to dampen expectations: “There is little room for maneuver,” he told the SZ. The pandemic hit the countries not only in terms of health policy, but also financially. They would have had to spend a lot to strengthen the health system, to support the economy, to help communities and to help the citizens. “The total debt has risen,” said Hilbers.
At the same time, due to the weaker economic situation, they would face structural tax shortfalls. The employees are valued highly. “But the state must still retain its ability to act.” In the medium term, the countries would have to return to a consolidation course.
So the question is: What’s in it for the employees? According to TdL, 845,000 direct collective bargaining employees in the federal states are affected by a qualification, plus 1.2 million civil servants and 875,000 pension recipients, i.e. pensioners. According to Hilbers, one percent more salary costs the federal states more than 460 million euros for the employees, with transfer to the civil servants it would be 1.4 to 1.5 billion.
Only 15 federal states sit at the table
The previous agreement by the federal government and municipalities is usually the point of reference for the country round. In 2020, the salary was 1.4 percent more – but at least 50 euros – from April 2021, plus another 1.8 percent in April 2022. In addition, there were surcharges for employees in intensive care, nursing or the health authorities and a corona premium . In the country round, the increased inflation could also play a role. Verdi boss Frank Werneke, for example, says that higher prices, for example for energy, are particularly noticeable with low and middle incomes. This is one of the reasons why the trade unions would demand a minimum amount in addition to a percentage wage demand, he told the SZ – which would mean a disproportionate increase for small incomes.
In fact, not even the unions should hope for a collective agreement like three years ago – the then Verdi boss Frank Bsirske spoke of the “best result in many years”. At that time they got eight percent more money out in three stages; the federal states put the costs at 7.3 billion euros – without transferring them to the officials.
As a rule, collective bargaining rounds in the public sector are complicated. It’s rarely just about more money, mostly also about the already difficult tariff network. The complexity begins with the question of who is actually affected by this round of countries. It starts with only 15 countries taking part. Hessen resigned from the TdL in 2004 in the wake of collective bargaining disputes. In the medium term, the employers’ alliance could lose another member: In autumn 2020, the general assembly of the TdL decided to kick Berlin out. The reason: The state had decided to continue to pay its employees the so-called capital city allowance, which, from the point of view of the other states, violates the statutes of the TdL.
In addition to the dispute over money against the backdrop of the pandemic, the desire of employers to negotiate the “work process” could cause trouble in the countries this time. This describes what a public service employee is responsible for – for example processing a file. The following applies: the more demanding the work, the higher the pay grade. That sounds like a boring administrative detail, but Verdi simply translates this request as “attack on the entire classification system”.
Depending on the “work process”, employees are divided into pay groups
The employers are concerned with the “big jobs”. Instead of breaking down an administrative process into small steps and sometimes assigning it to different people, legal clerks, for example, are now often responsible for the entire process: from incoming files in the post office to final processing. Since this naturally involves differently complex activities, the question arises: In which salary group is such a person classified?
The Federal Labor Court has ruled, says Verdi tariff expert Oliver Bandosz, that these employees should generally be classified higher. At least when they carried out difficult activities to a “legally relevant extent” – 13 or 15 percent were sufficient. The classification procedures for employees are limited to the judicial area, says Verdi boss Werneke. He therefore considers it inappropriate for employers to focus on the topic in such a way.
The unions want to prevent the work process from even being discussed in the collective bargaining talks. But TdL boss Hilbers says: “We want what was previously agreed with the trade unions to continue to apply: that employees with demanding jobs earn more than those who do less difficult work.” But for this you need small evaluation units instead of a large work process. It could not be fair, said Hilbers, that even a small proportion of demanding tasks are enough to be grouped into a higher pay level overall. “That is not compatible with performance-based pay.”
If the TdL has its way, it should therefore be made clear in the collective agreement that despite the case law of the Federal Labor Court, a subordinate, complicated activity is no longer sufficient for an automatic upgrade. At the same time, the TdL also called the Federal Constitutional Court to review the case law of the Federal Labor Court.
Werneke, on the other hand, says: “If we went in a direction that the TdL demands, then the door would open the door to a lower grouping of tens of thousands of colleagues – or at least to freezing the salary level.” Work processes would be more integrated through digitization alone. “The Taylorist division of work into many small steps is a thing of the past.”