Negotiations on skilled workers' agreements grind to a halt

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The determination of employers to introduce flexible working hours has brought negotiations of four collective agreements which affect skilled workers in Luxembourg to a halt in summer 1997.

The two representative trade unions, the OGB-L and the LCGB, presented their claims for a revised collective agreement covering 200 electricians in November 1996. The employers, most of whom are members of the Skilled Workers' Federation (Fédération des Artisans), rejected union demands for a pay rise out of hand, and focused on their main counter-proposal for introducing flexible working hours. The matter is still unresolved in summer 1997.

Negotiations covering plasterers, painters, plumbers, and heating and air-conditioning installation engineers are similarly at a standstill.

The employers' claim focuses on one of the reference periods for averaging out daily and weekly working hours provided for in a law of 9 December 1970 on employees' working hours. This option exists in response to rigidity in this legislation, which normally counts each hour worked over and above eight hours a day, or 40 hours a week, as overtime attracting statutory supplementary payments. The law, however, allows the Minister of Labour to grant certain economic sectors a dispensation from normal working hours (after the social partners have been asked for their opinion) whereby hours of work may be up to (but not exceed) 10 hours a day and can be evened out within periods of up to a year.

In all probability, the unions will submit these four issues to the National Conciliation Office with a view to having negotiations restarted at the end of the holiday period in September 1997.