DGB to assess national Alliance for Jobs

In April 2001, Germany's DGB trade union confederation announced that it was to conduct an assessment of the achievements of the tripartite national Alliance for Jobs, launched in late 1998. DGB will evaluate the Alliance in terms of its results in areas such as cutting unemployment, increasing employment, reducing overtime working and promoting training and part-time work.

On 3 April 2001, the federal board (Bundesvorstand) of the German Federation of Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB) issued a statement on the tripartite national Alliance for Jobs, Training and Competitiveness (Bündnis für Arbeit, Ausbildung und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit), launched in late 1998 (DE9812286N), stating that it wants to evaluate the success of the Alliance at the end of 2001. The federal board is made up of the presidents of DGB's affiliated unions, plus five members elected by the DGB executive board. This decision is not least a response to the decisions to opt out of the Alliance taken by the Media Trade Union (IG Medien) in September 2000 (DE0010285N) and by the Commerce, Banking and Insurance Union (Gewerkschaft Handel, Banken und Versicherungen, HBV) in November 2000 (DE0012296N). Both unions have urged DGB to terminate trade union participation in the Alliance.

In its April statement, the DGB federal board states that unions are participating in the Alliance for Jobs in order to fight unemployment, increase employment and raise the number of training posts. From a trade union point of view, the Alliance must therefore be judged by whether these aims are achieved or not. In this context, unions set great store by improving the situation in east Germany.

DGB states that the situation on the labour market is unsatisfactory because employers, in particular, are not sufficiently fulfilling their promise to utilise all possibilities to create employment. The increase recorded in the number of employed persons is, it is claimed, mostly a result of a new law extending social security coverage to workers in what was formerly "marginal" (ie low-hours) employment, which means that these workers are now included in the employment figures. The federal board further criticises the fact that in 2000 the level of overtime work was very high, at 1.85 billion paid overtime hours, indicating that employers could take on new employees, but are not doing so (DE0101201N). DGB also expects the government to take on greater responsibility for employment.

DGB thus wants to take stock of the concrete achievements of the Alliance for Jobs and make a political assessment of its operation. It will judge the Alliance by the following criteria:

• the increase in the number of training posts in companies;

• the fall in registered unemployment figures;

• the increase in employment covered by social security;

• the reduction of overtime hours through both collectively agreed and legal measures; and

• the increase in part-time employment as a response to employees' wishes to change from full-time to part-time work – including for a limited period. This is linked to the improvement of the employment and social conditions for part-time workers, especially concerning pensions.

Another criterion is whether collective agreements are concluded in the 2001 bargaining round on skills and qualifications (DE0104218F) and on pension schemes (DE0104216N). In addition, DGB believes that the EU's enlargement to central and eastern Europe should be made more socially acceptable by linking allocation of public sector contracts In Germany to observance of employment standards and collectively agreed wages.

DGB points out that the Alliance for Jobs is based on cooperation. In general, DGB thinks that the cooperation within the Alliance for Jobs and its working groups and top-level talks, and relating to the activities of the federal government, is working. Nevertheless, it is not acceptable for the unions that wage policy has become a central topic for the Alliance (DE0001232F) and that agreements within the Alliance are being used to keep the unions to pay targets. In this context, DGB underlines the importance of caution in dealing with the results of the Alliance in public.

Overall, the unions urge the government to follow an economic strategy based on an employment-oriented finance and fiscal policy. This policy should not be oriented solely towards budgetary consolidation, but should also take employment and social justice more into consideration.

Finally, the DGB federal board refers to the demands which should act as guidelines for the unions' policy within the Alliance for Jobs, and which should become the central reference points for discussions on employment and in the evaluation of the results achieved by the Alliance. These are the demands for a reform strategy to fight unemployment, laid down on the basis of DGB's basic programme (Grundsatzprogramm) adopted in 1996, and a subsequent document adopted in 1997, and taken up recently in the federal board's decision on a policy entitled Work 2001 (Arbeit 2001).