Employment & Labour Market

In recent years, however, the activities of DIN and, above all, of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) have increasingly extended into subject areas which are protected by the Basic Law as the primary field of activity of the industrial and social partners. The principles applicable to technical standardization cannot, for example, be transferred to the standardization of in-company personnel work, since here they come up against the autonomy of collective bargaining guaranteed by the Basic Law (Article 9 (3) GG). There is a rapidly growing number of standardization projects, particularly in the areas of company personnel policy and occupational health and safety. Other standards which directly affect the social partners are to be found in the areas of corporate social responsibility (CSR), whistleblowing, sustainable finance and compliance. Illustrative examples of this are the ISO standardization project "Human Resource Management", which, with a large number of ongoing or completed individual projects, affects almost all areas of company personnel policy, and the application on "Social Responsibility" for the creation of many new ISO standards on CSR. Particularly explosive in terms of personnel policy is the ISO project "Compensation", which aims to establish comprehensive, general rules for the area of remuneration, its design, processes, composition and responsibilities for all companies, regardless of size. The standardization project goes far beyond what is provided for, for example, by the Remuneration Transparency Act or the Minimum Wage Act in the private and public sectors. This undermines the regulations on pay that have been jointly negotiated in collective bargaining and company agreements.

 

In the area of occupational health and safety, two standards dealing with the subject of "psychosocial risks at work" are being developed simultaneously in an uncoordinated manner (cf. ISO 10075 and ISO 45003).

 

The guidelines for a whistleblowing management system are in final consultations at ISO level. So far, the draft guidelines go beyond the Whistleblowing Directive in some places. This is particularly explosive in light of the fact that the directive must be implemented in national law by 17 December 2021.

These initiatives are very often driven by individual interests and management consultants. As a result of such activities, employers, but also employees, in Germany are increasingly running the risk that operational room for manoeuvre is unnecessarily and -- unasked for - restricted. Although the application of a standard is basically voluntary, it can lead to a de facto compulsion to apply it due to its general acceptance as state-of-the-art and via public procurement, and can even become part of case law via the interpretation of indeterminate legal terms. In the DIN advisory committees, all representatives, regardless of how many companies or employees they speak for, have equal weight, so that individual interests can be enforced via a majority in the committees. In particular, the autonomy of collective bargaining, as a supporting pillar of the social market economy and guarantor of social peace and prosperity in Germany, is in danger of being restricted and undermined by such standardization projects.

It is not acceptable for interested parties to produce questionable "standards" in their own interests which damage the good reputation of the DIN standard and "impose" bureaucratic regulations on all employers which go far beyond the deliberate self-restrictions of the legislator.