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IG Metall and ver.di create joint bargaining committee at IBM

Germany
On 13 December 2001, the IG Metall metalworkers' trade union and the Unified Service Sector Union (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, ver.di) reached an agreement on future collective bargaining arrangements at IBM Deutschland GmbH. The two unions agreed to create a joint collective bargaining committee to negotiate the forthcoming agreements for the 26,000 or so employees at the German subsidiaries of the US-based information technology (IT) multinational.
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In December 2001, Germany's IG Metall metalworkers' trade union and Unified Service Sector Union (ver.di) signed an agreement creating a joint collective bargaining committee for the German operations of the US-based information technology multinational IBM. In future, new collective agreements at IBM should be negotiated jointly by both unions.

On 13 December 2001, the IG Metall metalworkers' trade union and the Unified Service Sector Union (Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, ver.di) reached an agreement on future collective bargaining arrangements at IBM Deutschland GmbH. The two unions agreed to create a joint collective bargaining committee to negotiate the forthcoming agreements for the 26,000 or so employees at the German subsidiaries of the US-based information technology (IT) multinational.

During the 1990s, there was strong union competition at IBM between IG Metall and the former German White-Collar Workers' Union (Deutsche Angestellten Gewerkschaft, DAG) which - unlike IG Metall - was not a member of the German Federation of Trade Unions (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB). The background for this competition was IBM's decision to leave the metalworking employers' association, Gesamtmetall, in the early 1990s, in order no longer to be covered by the branch-level collective agreements in metalworking negotiated by IG Metall. Instead IBM started to conclude new company agreements with DAG.

The disputes on trade union representation at IBM entered a new phase when DAG joined the merger process which resulted in the creation of ver.di, thereby reintegrating DAG into DGB (DE0104220F). In November 2000, prior to the formal creation of ver.di, the DGB affiliates and DAG signed a cooperation agreement in order to clarify organisational responsibilities, in particular in the 'new' sectors such as telecommunications and IT (DE0012297F). According to this agreement, the unions want to continue with the principle of having only one union per company, although sectoral changes in the economy have questioned the traditional organisational border-lines between unions.

Regarding the IT sector, the agreement states that IT companies which mainly produce IT hardware should fall within the organisational responsibility of IG Metall, while IT companies which mainly produce software and provide IT services should fall within the organisational responsibility of ver.di. For companies which originally produced IT hardware but have diversified into software production and IT services, the agreement says that IG Metall should be the union responsible. The agreement also states that all former DAG members automatically become members of ver.di.

After the creation of ver.di, the trade union situation at IBM continued to be complicated. When in spring 2001 former DAG trade union officials concluded - now in the name of ver.di - new collective agreements at IBM, IG Metall sharply criticised ver.di for contravening the DGB cooperation agreement. Since, for the time being, the two unions were not able to find a solution to their organisational dispute, they both called in the DGB arbitration committee. With support of the latter, IG Metall and ver.di finally agreed in December on the creation of the joint collective bargaining committee, which representatives of both unions called a good way of overcoming detrimental trade union competition.

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