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Employers bank on
regime change: Surprisingly, Metro is actively involved in attempts to weaken collective agreement protection in German commerce Germany's commerce employers have gone to attack against the country's collective agreement system. They want to make it easier for employers at the local level to make deals with their workers about wages and conditions, which are below those established in statewide industry agreements. Quite clearly, they are banking on the conservatives winning this autumn's elections, and supporting their deregulation demands. What may work in industries where workplaces are large and organising levels high will not necessarily work in retailing. Here, there is usually no balance of influence between the social partners on the local levels, and any 'agreements' would surely be dictated by the employers. Actually, the commerce employers' approach makes little sense if one looks at the competitive situation in German retailing. Metro's CEO Hans-Joachim Körber has been among those who have pointed out that a competitive focus only on prices, and the repeated price wars launched by Germany's hard discounters, put the quality of the retail sector at risk. That Körber's own company now seems to spearhead the efforts to weaken the collective agreements instead of trying to tie down also Wal-Mart and the hard discounters to their provisions does not seem very well advised. As UNI Commerce has repeatedly stated, geographically covering collective agreements which create a level playing field for all retail employers are the best defence for the entire industry, and particularly for those retailers who want to be responsible employers. At the UNI Commerce Global Union Summit, where senior Metro management were present, Jan Furstenborg underlined the discrepancy between the company's positive declaration on human resource principles, and their behaviour in this year's German collective bargaining round. If a company is serious about social dialogue and collective bargaining, then it cannot at the same time attack the very system of collective agreements, he said. On one hand, the Metro Group and Metro Cash & Carry work well together with UNI Commerce to ensure that fundamental workers' and trade union rights are respected, and that country subsidiaries negotiate collective agreements in good faith. Only Media Markt, Metro's home electronics chain, is a negative exception, with an anti-union approach in many countries. But then on the other hand, the company seems to make use of the fact that some of their leading competitors are anti-union and anti-collective-agreement to push its own standards down instead of joining forces with its social partners to ensure a functioning labour relations structure in Germany also in the future. This is not the way to ensure labour stability and social justice, nor will it promote the business interests of commerce itself.
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