Some readers of the printed edition of this newspaper may have come across a small notice recently: “Due to a strike at the printing works, you will not receive your local section in the usual structure today,” was what was read in the regional edition on Wednesday. The SZ editorial team – we would like to make this note on our own behalf – is currently having to re-plan a little now and again, and some local editions are a little thinner and sorted differently than usual on strike days.
The background to this is a wage dispute between the Verdi union and the Federal Association of Printing and Media (BVDM), in which little progress has been made so far. Verdi is demanding a twelve percent pay increase for the 100,000 or so employees in the printing works, but the BVDM says: Not with us. The Süddeutsche Verlag printing works are also affected by the strikes.
So far there have been five rounds of negotiations
What makes the conflict particularly complicated is that both sides are convinced that they have strong arguments – and they feel pressure from their members not to give in. Since March, five rounds of negotiations have taken place without anything significant happening; the collective bargaining parties want to make the sixth attempt this Thursday when they meet in Nuremberg.
At Verdi, they know that they will not be able to push through their demand for twelve percent more money for the next twelve months one-to-one; that almost never works in collective bargaining. But it cannot be much less, says Rachel Marquardt, Verdi’s chief negotiator: “Our colleagues do good work every day, under difficult conditions. That must be rewarded with a substantial pay increase.”
The trade unionists see a need to catch up on employees’ salaries for two reasons. Firstly, there is the high inflation of the past few years – a total of 13 percent in 2022 and 2023 alone – for which the printers have never received compensation. You can certainly see it that way, although Verdi is not entirely innocent: At the end of March 2022, the trade unionists had agreed to a collective agreement that increased printers’ wages by just 3.5 percent over the next two years. Vladimir Putin had already invaded Ukraine at that time, Germany was discussing Russian gas supplies, and the rate of inflation had already climbed somewhat. But many people, including Verdi, had not seen that it would get so bad and that inflation would reach 13 percent in the past two years.
Then there is the long-term wage trend, which is the union’s second argument: printers’ salaries have only risen by 43.5 percent since 2000, while in comparable industries such as paper processing the increase is 67 percent. Not to mention the wage increase in the economy as a whole – 76.7 percent. Of course, Verdi also knows that times are not exactly rosy in the printing industry. Nevertheless, there are limits to decency when it comes to pay – and these should not be undercut.
The times are not exactly rosy – this, in turn, is the core argument used by employers to oppose a sharp wage increase. It is not just employees who have suffered from the wave of inflation in recent years, but also companies: the energy price shock as a result of the war in Ukraine and the rise in paper prices have caused production costs to rise enormously. “The cost increases cannot easily be passed on to customers due to the high competitive pressure, especially from countries with cheaper production,” says BVDM General Manager Kirsten Hommelhoff. The order situation has improved; in the first half of 2024, printing plants were again at 76 percent capacity. Overall, however, the situation remains difficult.
It is unlikely that this will change in the next few years: digitization is causing part of the business to disappear, for example because there are fewer and fewer printed newspapers. The industry is shrinking, as can be seen from figures from the BVDM: in 2017 there were 8,400 printing companies in Germany with 136,000 employees; today there are 6,500 companies and 30,000 fewer employees. Compared to 2018, the printing industry has lost around a third of its production output.
But that doesn’t mean that the industry is now dying a slow death, says BVDM managing director Hommelhoff: “Print will always exist.” Every supermarket is a “showcase of the printing industry’s performance,” and packaging and labels, for example, will have to be printed in the future. The state and administration would also demonstrably not function without printed paper and paper products, says Hommelhoff. Industry experts assume that the market will consolidate in the long term.
This leads to the point on which employers and Verdi agree for once: in order to be fit for the future, companies must become more attractive to young skilled workers; as in so many other sectors, there is a shortage of them, including in the printing industry. Apprentices must therefore be paid more money. Who knows – perhaps this unity will help to reach an agreement on the other points of contention. It is not only SZ readers who would probably thank the collective bargaining parties.