The IG Metall started the first warning strikes in the German metal and metal and electrical industry on Saturday night. Immediately after the end of the peace obligation at midnight, workers in selected industrial companies stopped working, as reported by local trade unionists.
In North Rhine-Westphalia alone, six companies were to be on strike for a few hours each on Saturday. Employees of the metal processing company apt Extrusions stopped working completely at 00.01 a.m., as Kati Köhler, union secretary at IG Metall Cologne-Leverkusen, said. A good 60 to 70 colleagues followed the call for a warning strike – including 15 to 20 members of the IG Metall Jugend, the union’s youth organization.
rallies across Germany
According to trade unionist Jens Mütze, almost 150 employees took part in a rally in Hagen, at the Thyssenkrupp Hohenlimburg site. Around 100 to 110 employees gathered in front of Gate 3 of the Miele plant in Bielefeld at 12:01 a.m. and stopped work. Delegations from other companies from Bielefeld and the old district of Halle also took part in the campaign, as IG Metall announced.
According to IG Metall, more than 150 employees met in front of the gates of Clarios Varta Hannover GmbH in the Lower Saxony tariff area. District manager and negotiator Thorsten Gröger said in a speech on site: “We would all have been spared all that if the employers had moved around the negotiating table in good time. But their refusal to conduct proper collective bargaining with us caused this escalation. How long and How intensively this conflict must be conducted is in the hands of the employers’ associations. We are prepared to go to the extreme, even for a longer period of time!”.
During a warning strike in Bersenbrück, Lower Saxony, 230 employees of the Lear Corporation GmbH stopped work for one and a half hours from midnight to stand up for the wage demands of IG Metall.
Further campaigns were planned in Munich and at Thyssenkrupp Rasselstein in Andernach in the Rhineland. In Baden-Württemberg, work at the auto supplier Kolbenschmidt in Neckarsulm was to be suspended for a limited period.
Demand: permanently eight percent more money
In the negotiations that have been conducted regionally so far, the employers have each offered one-off payments of 3,000 euros and also an unspecified increase in the wage tables for a period of 30 months. The one-off payment should reach the employees directly, free of taxes and duties. The union, on the other hand, is demanding eight percent more money for the approximately 3.9 million employees for a period of twelve months.
IG Metall boss Jörg Hofmann has asked employers to offer sustainable wage increases. “It is still unclear how the salaries of the employees are to be increased in the long term,” said the trade unionist to the “Handelsblatt” on Friday. Hofmann indicated that only shorter warning strikes of a few hours are planned until the fourth round of negotiations, which begins on November 8 in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
The demand for 8.0 percent for a term of twelve months is the highest demand in the metal and electrical industry since 2008. The expected inflation cannot be fully offset with this, so trade union boss Hofmann repeatedly called for state aid for households, including a demanded a brake on energy prices and is urging us to hurry.
