The German steel company Thyssen-Krupp Steel (TKS), the company works council, the German Metalworkers' Union (IG Metall) and the employers' association Gesamtmetall concluded a new collective agreement on working time on 5 July 2006. Following this agreement the standard weekly working time of the company's 18,000 employees will be cut from 35 to 34 hours without pay compensation. In exchange forced redundancies are excluded until 2013 and the company is to create 500 new jobs as a result of the reduced weekly-working time.