In the fight for higher wages, Austrian commercial workers are holding warning strikes again this week. The next – sixth – round of negotiations on the new collective labor agreement will not take place until Friday afternoon.
The GPA plans temporary strikes and “several small actions” on Wednesday and Thursday, it said in a broadcast on Tuesday. Due to the negotiations, the planned major actions, strikes and ‘hotspot actions’ for Friday have been temporarily suspended.
“Finally clearing the way”
This Friday, employers are expected to “consider the proposal for a fair, socially balanced agreement and finally pave the way for an agreement,” said Helga Fichtinger, the union’s chief negotiator.
Eight percent plus – offer rejected
During the fifth round of negotiations, the union did not want to accept the employer’s offer for an eight percent wage increase without a social scale. The Handels-KV concerns the salaries of 430,000 employees and students. It is the largest industry collective labor agreement in Austria. The union is pushing for an increase of 9.4 percent. The rolling inflation rate from October 2022 to September 2023 was 9.2 percent.
If no agreement is reached between employer and employee representatives in the coming days, the federal trade department of the Austrian Chamber of Commerce (WKO) wants to make a recommendation for “a sustainable salary increase” to companies. A recommendation “does not have any legally binding force and would deliberately cause great damage to a proven system of salary determination based on social partnership, which has contributed significantly to the success of the Austrian economy,” criticized trade unionist Fichtinger.
Commercial chairman: “Formula Benya more than fulfilled”
WKO trading chairman Rainer Trefelik considers compliance with the so-called Benya formula to be “more than satisfactory”, because productivity and turnover in the retail sector are declining. With this formula, the inflation rate of the past twelve months plus the average productivity growth is the target for compensation in the KV negotiations.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
