Source: pa/dpa/Daniel Löb
According to the union, the four-day week should make the steel industry more attractive to young people, who will be urgently needed in the coming years in the conversion of the coal-based heavy industry to green steel.
DIG Metall wants to implement a four-day week with full wage compensation in the steel industry. That will be a central demand of the union in the coming collective bargaining round, said Knut Giesler, head of IG Metall in North Rhine-Westphalia, of the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ).
Giesler is the negotiator in the north-west German steel industry (NRW, Lower Saxony, Hesse and Bremen), which usually achieves the pilot deal for the entire industry. Negotiations won’t start until November, but after the broadest possible participation and survey of employees, Giesler wants to tie down the issue of a four-day week within his union before the summer holidays. Irrespective of this, there will also be a wage demand that will only be made shortly before the start of negotiations.
“We want to achieve real relief for employees without them earning less,” Giesler told the WAZ. That would be great progress for quality of life and health. The feedback from the steel workforce so far has been extremely positive.
At the same time, the four-day week would make the steel industry more attractive for young people, who will be urgently needed in the coming years when coal-based heavy industry is converted to green steel, Giesler says: “We need young, intelligent people for this – and they’re competing for them we with many other industries.” At the same time, the four-day week is also an opportunity to prevent the job losses that are to be expected in the course of the green transformation of the steel industry.
Specifically, Giesler envisages reducing the weekly working time from 35 to 32 hours for the introduction of the four-day week in the steel industry, with full wage compensation. What is much easier to implement in administration and in two-shift operation becomes more difficult in three-shift operation. These so-called full-time shifts are more about eliminating the unloved “available shifts” that are currently required to achieve the weekly average of 35 hours. And the creation of free shifts, which would give employees more freedom in leisure activities.
However, IG Metall assumes that this reduction will take a long time, possibly several years – also in order not to overwhelm employers when changing service and shift plans. “We need longer creep-in times here,” said Giesler.
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