More than 4,000 workers across the industry are planning to shut down machines for up to five days ahead of talks, planned for 5 June, between German employers federation BDA and union Ver.di over national pay increases.

The talks next week will be the fifth round of negotiations over this year’s collective pay agreement. Ver.di originally asked for a pay increase of 6.5% from April for the industry’s 180,000 workers.

However, the union last week changed its demands to a 3.8% increase backdated to April 2007 for one year, and a further increase of 2.5% for the following six months.

BDA is offering 1.8% starting from June and 2.4% for the following six months.

Prior to the fourth round of talks, several thousand Ver.di members went on strike, causing a reduction in pagination for some of the country’s national newspapers.

Natalia Stolz, spokeswoman for BDA, told PrintWeek: “The wage demand shows that Ver.di is not orientating itself to the specific business situation of the printing industry… but to the collective agreement of the prospering metal industry. The business situations of the two are not comparable.”

But a spokeswoman for Ver.di said: “We have said that 3.8% would be fine for the first year and the metal sector is getting 4.1%. Their industry is not a lot healthier than ours.

“The economic situation here is improving and it is stronger than it was in 2005 when we had our last increase.”

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PRINT IN GERMANY
Employees in all size companies 179,261
Companies with less than 20 staff 9,663
Companies with more than 20 staff 1,688
Total turnover EUR17.1bn (£11.6bn)
Employees 116,257
Average salary EUR35,086 (£23,800)
Sources: BVDM and German Federal Labour Office