Frankfurt am Main – Following the failure of collective bargaining negotiations for contract logistics in the metal and electrical industries, IG Metall will continue its current strategy and work with employees to secure collective bargaining agreements at individual contract logistics service providers. “Employers have missed a major opportunity. A collective bargaining agreement would have ensured clear, stable conditions in this sector. Now, the disputes at contract logistics companies will continue. We will enter into negotiations with each individual company. Employees in the industrial contract logistics sector will not settle for low wages and poor working conditions. This has already been demonstrated by the collective bargaining agreements reached at many individual companies,” said Jörg Hofmann, President of IG Metall, on Thursday in Frankfurt following the meeting of the central bargaining committee.
IG Metall’s central collective bargaining commission decided on Thursday to continue pushing for collective bargaining agreements at individual contract logistics service providers. IG Metall has already succeeded in doing so at numerous contract logistics firms in the metal and electrical industries, such as Imperial Automotive Logistics in Osnabrück, Rudolph Logistik in Wolfsburg, and Schenker AG in Hanover.
IG Metall and the employers parted ways without reaching an agreement in the fourth round of negotiations. The sticking points in the negotiations were the scope of the collective bargaining agreements, their binding nature, and the level of compensation for employees. On these issues, the employers—the German Freight Forwarding and Logistics Association and the employers’ association for the metal and electrical industry, Gesamtmetall—were not prepared to make an offer acceptable to IG Metall. “The obstructionist stance of the logistics and metal industry employers clearly shows that they have no interest in reliable and fair employment conditions in the sector,” said Hofmann. “They continue to rely on circumventing collective bargaining agreements, low wages, and poor working conditions. This is not a model for the future of this sector and its employees.”
In addition to traditional logistics tasks such as transportation, contract logistics service providers take on other tasks such as goods handling, order picking, supplying production lines, and in some cases even assembly or processing steps. In recent years, metal and electrical companies have increasingly outsourced industrial work to contract logistics providers: the in-plant supply of parts to assembly lines. And, with growing frequency, assembly work as well. IG Metall had negotiated with logistics and metal industry employers for a total of five months. The goal was to consolidate the company-level collective bargaining agreements concluded by IG Metall in the contract logistics sector into a sector-wide collective bargaining agreement.
