Collective agreements in Slovenia are often irrelevant as a way of determining the wages of many private sector workers. This is because most wages are determined by a nationally agreed nine-class tariff that sets the lowest basic wage for all types of work and levels of experience. The minimum tariff in the first five of these classes is often lower than the national minimum wage. This means that pay for many workers is instead determined by the Law on the Minimum Wage.
In Slovenia, collective agreements in the private sector have become a weak instrument of wage determination because the pay of many workers is determined by the Law on the Minimum Wage (LMW).
Sectoral collective agreements set what is referred to as the lowest basic wage (the lowest gross basic monthly wage for 174 hours of work). Different types of work and a worker’s experience and level of responsibility are allowed for in a nine-class tariff that sets the lowest basic wages for a sector, from the simplest work (Class I) to the most demanding or important work (Class IX).
Article 127 of the Law on Employment Relationships (LER) says that ‘the basic wage shall be laid down according to the level of difficulty of work for which the worker has concluded the employment contract’.
Article 126 of the LER says that:
As regards the wage, the employer must take account of the minimum laid down by law and/or collective agreement, which binds him directly... A wage is composed of the basic wage, part of the wage for job performance and extra payments. A constituent element of the wage is the remuneration for business performance, if laid down by collective agreement or employment contract.
Different tariff classes are laid down by collective agreements in different sectors. The existing lowest basic wages (LBWs) determined by selected sectoral collective agreements are:
For 2013, the statutory monthly minimum wage has been set at €783.66 gross.
The effect of this is that in the electro, metals and metal materials industries, the first five classes of their respective tariffs are squeezed into one, because no employer is allowed to pay less than the minimum wage. For textile workers, the first seven of the sector’s nine tariffs fall below the national minimum wage.
A further problem is that all workers in the first five tariff classes – and all textile sector workers in the first seven classes – get the same statutory minimum wage. Workers may be entitled to extra payments on top of their basic wage to compensate them, for example, for night work, working beyond their normal hours, or in recognition of more than 30 years of service. However, because their basic rate under the tariff system is so far below the minimum wage, many workers find that these extra payments are included in the ‘top-up’ amount that their employer has to pay to bring wages up to the legal minimum level (SI1301031I, SI1301041I).
When collective bargaining was last underway in the metal sector, the trade unions demanded that no lowest basic wage should be lower than the statutory minimum wage and that, in addition to their rate set by the tariff, a worker should also receive:
The employers appealed to the trade unions to drop their ‘unreasonable’ demands, which they said would endanger jobs by causing even more company closures and further diminishing the competitiveness of the economy.
Štefan Skledar, UMAR