Federal Labour Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) is making a new attempt to promote the spread of collective agreements and strengthen the rights of trade unions in companies. This is evident from a draft law from his ministry, which the South German Newspaper According to this, the federal government may in future only award public contracts to companies that pay at least the agreed wages. Heil had already presented a draft for a “Federal Collective Agreement Compliance Act” in May last year, but this was thwarted by differences of opinion within the traffic light coalition, particularly from the FDP.
In July, the coalition agreed on a catalogue of measures to get the stagnating economy moving. As part of this “growth initiative”, the SPD, Greens and FDP reaffirmed their agreement from the coalition agreement to strengthen collective bargaining compliance by law. Heil’s draft law is now intended to implement this.
The Federal Minister of Labor has added regulations compared to his draft from May 2023. The original draft law covered federal contracts worth at least 10,000 euros, the new plans now set the threshold at 25,000 euros, so fewer contracts are affected. In addition to the collective wage, the requirements also include, for example, a minimum paid annual vacation and maximum working hours.
One possible point of contention with these requirements is which collective agreement should serve as the benchmark if several collective agreements apply in a company. In the event of differences of opinion, representatives of employers and unions should come to an agreement. In the event of a dispute, both sides should submit a statement on the basis of which the Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Economic Affairs will then make a decision. Heil also included this procedure in the draft law.
The background to the plans is the development that fewer and fewer employees in Germany are working under a collective agreement. The DGB has been calling for a collective bargaining law for years. DGB chair Yasmin Fahimi demanded on Monday: “The federal government must now quickly decide on its fundamental promise of collective bargaining compliance.” FDP small business politician Carl-Julius Cronenberg said that his party would “carefully check that small and medium-sized companies are not excluded from tendering procedures.”
Heil has also had other concerns of his department written into the draft bill. For example, unions should be able to address employees in the company not only personally, but also digitally. To do this, they should be able to “engage in dialogue with them via the digital communication channels used in the company”, provide information about their work and recruit members. Heil wants to respond to the development that employees are increasingly working individually and away from the company, for example in a home office – and can therefore be contacted primarily via digital channels. The large unions have been losing members for years.
Heil also wants to ensure that when companies are spun off within a group, the agreed collective agreement continues to apply to the employees. Some companies have opted out of the collective agreement in this way in the past. The draft law is now intended to guarantee that in such cases the companies are permanently bound to the collective agreement rules.