Frankfurt/Main – “In companies in the IT and telecommunications sectors covered by collective bargaining agreements, salaries rose by nearly five percent in 2009 despite the global financial and economic crisis,” said Helga Schwitzer, executive board member of IG Metall. This is the most striking finding of the latest ICT Wage Analysis, which IG Metall released on Monday in Frankfurt. In companies not bound by collective bargaining agreements, salaries fell by an average of approximately two percent. “This significant difference clearly speaks in favor of collective bargaining agreements,” Schwitzer emphasized.
On average, across all companies and jobs surveyed, wages increased by approximately 2.3 percent. In most of the 16 job families surveyed, salaries remained very stable. There were slight pay increases in the areas of consulting (up 1.7 percent), software development (up 1.7 percent), administration (up 2.0 percent), and sales (up 1.2 percent). Significant increases were recorded in hardware development (up 6.1 percent), call centers (call center agents up 5.9 percent), and marketing (up 6.0 percent). Declines were seen in technical service (down 1.4 percent) and training (down 0.7 percent).
Within the hierarchy of job families, lower-income earners tended to see increases, while some managers suffered losses. The number of employees with a variable pay component continued to rise. However, in nearly two-thirds of the job groups surveyed, variable pay components declined.
Employees at companies bound by collective bargaining agreements, on the other hand, could rely on income increases guaranteed by those agreements. “Nevertheless, there is by no means a celebratory mood in the industry, as many companies are using the crisis to cut costs and eliminate jobs,” noted Helga Schwitzer.
According to a recent study by the industry association BITKOM, there is a shortage of around 20,000 IT experts in Germany alone, despite massive job cuts. When the economy picks up again, the demand for IT specialists will rise even further.
“This makes it all the more serious that the number of apprenticeship contracts in the IT and telecommunications industry fell by about 13 percent in 2009 compared to the previous year, from 17,031 to 14,817,” said Schwitzer. In addition, she noted, the proportion of women in IT apprenticeships had dropped to 8.2 percent—the lowest level in years. “The industry’s problems in attracting young talent are largely self-inflicted. A turnaround is urgently needed.” ICT companies must offer their employees reliable prospects for the future. This includes investing more heavily in training and continuing education going forward. “Only then can we win young people back to the industry and make it more attractive to women as well,” Schwitzer emphasized. At the same time, countermeasures must be taken through funding that is independent of economic cycles to prevent the number of apprenticeships from declining even further. Schwitzer also called on companies to use the new tools for job security and the hiring of trained workers—created by the current collective bargaining agreement for the metal and electrical industry—to avoid layoffs.
IG Metall’s salary analysis provides a broad, empirically based overview of the actual gross annual salaries paid by companies covered by collective bargaining agreements and those not covered. To this end, various ICT-typical activities were assigned to a total of 74 different jobs across 16 job families, and 25,061 data points from 102 companies were evaluated. In addition, through a long-term comparison, the analysis provides a good overview of job trends over the period from 1999 to 2009.
