Eastern Germany’s trade union revival

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On 9 November, Germany will celebrate 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which opened the way for German reunification.

A quarter of a century after this event, however, an invisible border still separates East and West Germany: the income gap.

Per capita, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a third lower in the regions of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the average salary is €800 less (US$1015) than in the western part of the country.

Today, unemployment is over nine per cent in the east of the country, compared to a rate of only 5.8 per cent in the West.

This economic situation has long been an obstacle to trade union demands in the former East Germany. Today, this is no longer the case.

“With the de-industrialisation of the 1990s, the fear of losing your jobs is still much stronger here than in the West,” explains Franziska Wolf, general secretary of the trade union IG Metall in Zwickau, in the state of Saxony.

“But in the last few years people have been less and less willing to work for poverty wages. They say that anyway the situation cannot really get worse. So they are taking action.”

Last year, Wolf led the first strike in the textile industry in the eastern part of Germany. The aim was higher salaries. And they won.

The strikers won a 5.6 per cent pay rise over two years for 16,000 textile workers in the region.

“In our sector, we still have wages of less than €7 (US$8.80) an hour in companies not covered by collective agreements. So a lot of colleagues were expecting this strike,” she added.

 

Taking up the organising challenge

The East German labour market is still lagging behind when it comes to labour relations.

Over half (53 per cent) of workers in the east of the country are not covered by a collective agreement, compared to 40 per cent in the West.

They have to negotiate their wages and working conditions directly with their employers, therefore.

“The vast majority of companies in the region are very small enterprises with less than five employees. It is harder to negotiate collective agreements in these,” says Iris Kloppich, president of the Saxony branch of the German trade union confederation, DGB.

They are also far behind in terms of workers’ representation.

In what used to be GDR, only 36 per cent of workers are represented by a works council (Betriebsrat). In the former West, that figure is 43 per cent.

“Setting up a committee to represent workers is still a real battle in Germany, and all the more so in East Germany,” says Heiner Dribbusch, a researcher at the economic think-tank the Hans Böckler Foundation in Düsseldorf.

But there too, things are changing.

Twenty-five year-old Stephan Sander set up a workers’ committee in 2011, for example, in his enterprise, a multiplex cinema in Leipzig.

“We were having problems with our employer over working hours. And it was impossible to discuss anything at all with him,” he said.

In addition, they were paid very low wages of around €6 (US$7.50) gross per hour.

Sander did not hesitate to do something about it, and was elected, along with two colleagues, to represent the cinema’s 26 employees.

“The employer went to court to challenge the election, in vain. But since then we have won several improvements in our working conditions,” he said.

More and more workers from eastern Germany are taking up the challenge of organising.

“In the 130 enterprises we cover in the mechanics sector in the Saxony-Anhalt region, we have seen the creation of 25 new workers’ committees since 2012,” says Martin Donat, general secretary of the Halle branch of IG Metall.

“And in five enterprises negotiations are currently underway to demand a collective agreement, in some cases accompanied by strikes.”

The brand new legal minimum wage adopted this summer should also help reduced the income gap between the two Germanys.

Set at €8.50 (US$10.70) gross per hour, it will come into force on 1 January 2015.
“Achieving a single minimum wage for East and West Germany is a success,” says Wolfgang Lemb, the vice-president of IG Metall.

“It was by no means certain we would achieve it at the start of the discussions”.

 

This article has been translated from French.