Germany
Service ver.di has again criticised the Evangelical Church for trying to prevent the union negotiating a collective agreement to cover the church’s 130,000 workers who deliver a range of health and social services. The church wants a so-called Employment Commission to regulate pay and conditions and was putting pressure on worker representatives to support this option by saying that collective bargaining was not an option.
Read more at > ver.di (DE)
The JHL trade union has expressed frustration at the decision of the state and church employers not to finalise negotiations over pay increases for 2023. They are apparently waiting to see how things develop in the key technology industry in the private sector. JHL raises the question of whether the church and state employers should be looking towards the private sector to influence their negotiations and also whether or not this is in effect a form of coordination that employer organisations have rejected in the past. In both church and state negotiations there is a commitment to negotiate a
Next month in the Lower Saxony region, the ver.di services union and Marburger Bund doctors' union will begin negotiations over a collective agreement with church organisations. This marks a breakthrough after courts cases have established union rights in the face of claims by church bodies that they should be able to maintain their special arrangements of joint committees that determine workers' pay and conditions. The collective agreement will, however, be negotiated with a process of arbitration and both sides have agreed to cooperate in this new approach which might provide a model for
Services union ver.di is keeping up the pressure on church organisations in order to secure collective agreements and to affirm the right to strike. At the beginning of the month over 200 employees from two church institutions demonstrated in Hannover in support of their demands for a collective agreement. There was also some good news with a church-run clinic in Oldenburg saying it wanted to start negotiations with ver.di. Read more at > ver.di (DE)
