COBIS - European Collective Bargaining Information System for the Chemical Industry

The need for European co-ordination of collective bargaining (CB) is one of the top priorities of the ETUC as well as for EMCEF. In an ongoing project ETUI will put European CB co-ordination into practice within the EMCEF-sectors. This requires primarly the existence of an efficient information and monitoring system on relevant sectoral bargaining issues, results and objectives for each country. The ETUI carried out a preliminary comparative analysis on collective bargaining in the chemical industries of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Denmark in 1998-99. It was followed by an evaluation on the outcome of CB in 2001/2002 supported by a questionnaire. It was sent out to the responsable officers of the EMCEF affiliates in the 15 EU countries plus the 4 Visegrad countries (Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic). The outcome was presented in a draft report on Collective Bargaining Information System for the European Chemical Industry. In a first step a CB-calendar started, situated in the intranet of EMCEF. Everybody who has access to the website can make use of it and is asked to update it.

Running Time:

04/2005 -> 03/2006

Description

From the findings one may conclude:
In several countries one can observe a change of employers attitude to get out of the industry collective agreements, either in applying lower standards of service sectors (Austria) or trying to achieve individual agreements with employees. Some employers federations still like to negotiate on annual framework for working time and wages. Moreover, cross-border and cross-sectoral MNC`s seems to gamble with national trade unions in looking to most comfortable conditions for themselves. This development could push from the new CEE-member states.

Many negotiations in 2002 and 2003 are influenced by the pension issue mostly regarding the demand on complementary pensions from the companies (Denmark, Belgium, Germany, in Spain and Belgium concentration particularly on inclusion of SME`s) or in order to preserve standards against government plans to reduce them (Greece, France, Italy: compensation in case of early retirement). In the Netherlands a big deficit in the conribution-based pension scheme, caused by the decline of stockmarkets, led to immense pressure in negotiations at company level. Moreover, the integration of wage and salary conditions in one collective agreements remained a top-issue on the negotiation agenda in some countries.

From this advanced state of the project we are able to improve the system further. The ETUI provides to draft the CB-report continously as well as scientific and methodological support. ETUI will accompagny the debate within EMCEF-affiliates and will offer input based on research on CB.Concerning the contents the project will focus on elaborating qualitative aspects of CB. Moreover, ETUI will observe the CB-results in the Euroepan
Countries and will support the ongoing update of the EMCEF-database.

Researchers

Norbert Kluge

Senior researcher
phone: +32 (0) 2 224 05 08, 00492102135551

Publications

Last modified: 04/04/2005 5:34 pm

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