Electricity, Remunicipalisation, Privatisation, Germany, Finland

After lengthy negotations, services union ver.di has endorsed a new agreement with the Uniper energy company that it will put to its members over the coming weeks. Key elements of the deal are commitments to no compulsory redundancies and to an early retirement scheme, seen by ver.di as important for the company's coal-powered operations that will face restructuring. This part of the agreement will run to 2022 while the long-term pay deal will run to 2024. The union prevented the company from cutting bonuses like Christmas pay but performance pay will be ended. In 2018 workers will get a lump

(May 2017) Two members of ver.di with the support of their union and the DGB confederation have won an important ruling in the European Court of Justice that protects the link between their pay and conditions and the public sector collective agreement. The two hospital employees were part of a transfer to a private company in 1997 but were then transferred again when the Asklepios company won the contract. Asklepios refused to maintain the link with the public sector collective agreement arguing that it was not party to the original negotiations. The European Court decided in favour of the

(October 2016) Public service union JHL has written to local authority members across the country warning of many of the problems created by outsourcing. It quotes survey evidence indicating threats to service quality coming from cuts to jobs and working time as well as trends towards using less skilled staff. While noting that over 100 municipalities have brought services back in-house, JHL says there is still a trend towards outsourcing which, in healthcare, is now dominated by a small number of big companies.