Waste workers organized by Verdi will go to Cologne (Koln) to protest against the low wages, dismissals and deteriorating service quality which is the consequence of DSD refusing to demand respect for the waste sector collective agreement in the public contracts it tenders, 6 December 2006. The latest round of tendering saw companies lose their contracts due to underpricing of other, often cowboy, companies, which do not abide by the collective agreement. Companies then dismiss workers or slash wages in desperate attempts to win public contracts. Verdi has demanded that DSD which is the company that farms out the contracts to collect, sort and recycle waste, includes respect for the national collective agreement as one of the criteria in its contracts but it refuses. Collective agreements in Germany apply to the companies which are members of the employers organization and are usually not declared generally binding. Companies can thus offer prices far below the collective agreement and exploit workers.
The protest will be before the head office of DSD. DSD is a company which has been bought by a US private equity fund -KKR. EPSU has sent a message of support to the protesting workers and Verdi. It is a demand of EPSU that the European public procurement directives should make it binding to respect the relevant collective agreements. For more information: http://presse.verdi.de/pressemitteilungen/showNews?id=39f77c0a-843c-11db-450d-000e0c672486
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