Opening clauses in chemicals agreements rarely used

In February 1999, Germany's IG BCE trade union held a conference on recent developments in collective bargaining. The event brought to light the fact that, so far, only very few companies have made use of "opening clauses" within the chemicals industry's sectoral collective agreements, allowing firms to deviate from the agreements' provisions in areas such as working time or pay.

On 5-6 February 1999, the Mining, Chemical and Energy Union (IG Bergbau Chemie Energie, IG BCE) held a conference in Hanover, bringing together around 270 local union members in order to evaluate recent developments in German collective bargaining. The contributions to the conference, which were subsequently published by the union, give a broad overview of the experiences in IG BCE-related sectors (Allgemeine Arbeitsbedingungen - tarifliche Bindung oder betriebliche Gestaltung. Protokoll der Fachtagung in Hannover am 5/6 Februar 1999, IG BCE (ed)).

IG BCE is the German trade unions which uses most actively the concept of "regulated decentralisation" in order to react to employers' demands for a more differentiated and company-related regulation of industrial relations matters. Since the mid-1990s, IG BCE has agreed on the introduction of various "opening clauses" in its branch-level collective agreements, which allow companies, under specific conditions and to a certain extent, to modify or to diverge from collectively agreed standards. (DE9709229F). The two most prominent opening clauses which were pioneered in the chemicals industry are:

1. the "working time corridor", which allows companies to reduce or to extend working time by 2.5 hours around the 37.5-hour working week (introduced for the first time in 1993); and

2. the "wage corridor", which allows companies to reduce remuneration by up to 10% of the collectively agreed rate in order to save jobs and/or to improve competitiveness (introduced for the first time in 1997) (DE9706216F).

The procedure for the use of the opening clause is in both cases as follows: first, management and works council at company level have to reach agreement on the deviation from the collectively agreed standards; then this works agreement has to be supported by the sector-level trade union and employers' associations. Without this support from the sector-level bargaining parties, companies are not allowed to use the opening clause.

During the February collective bargaining conference, IG BCE published for the first time comprehensive data on the real use of these opening clauses so far. According to IG BCE figures, of the 1,700 companies with 590,000 employees covered by the sectoral collective agreement for the west German chemical industry, only 120 companies with 29,000 employees are currently using the "working time corridor". About half of these firms, accounting for about 60% of the affected employees, have concluded a working time extension while the other half of the companies, with 40% of the relevant employees, have agreed on a working time reduction. A further 47 companies with 14,000 employees have adopted the working time corridor only for a particular department or group of employees. As for the "wage corridor", only 29 companies with 15,700 employees have made use of it so far.

For IG BCE, the relatively low take-up of the agreed working time and wage corridors proves that the use of opening clauses remains an exception, focused on companies faced by particular economic circumstances, and has not led to an overall erosion of branch-level agreements, as some critics had assumed. In February 1999, IG BCE and 22 employers' associations agreed a joint declaration stating that they will follow the path of "regulated decentralisation" of collective bargaining (DE9902294N).