Arbeitsrecht & Tarifpolitik

The , in particular the sectoral or area collective agreement, has a decisive influence on industrial relations in Germany. For most employers, collective bargaining with a trade union, whether on their own or as a member of an employers' association, is the preferred form of shaping working conditions. Since companies that are not bound by collective agreements are also guided by them, collective agreements form the basis for more than three quarters of employment relationships in this country. In total, there are over 78,000 valid collective agreements and around 6,000 new collective agreements are agreed each year (source: BMAS, 2019).

The BDA advocates that the sectoral collective agreement should retain its regulatory function in shaping working conditions in the future, while at the same time ensuring that companies have the necessary room for manoeuvre. In the recent past, moderate collective wage agreements and agreements for more flexibility in companies have already set in motion a course of modernisation in collective bargaining policy. This course should be consistently pursued with the aim of reducing overregulation and strengthening the scope for action at company level. Collective bargaining conditions must once again be minimum conditions in the economic sense. In order to give companies and employees sufficient freedom, collective agreements should therefore primarily be framework regulations. By constantly adapting the sectoral collective agreement to changes in company practice, decision-making powers can be shifted from the collective to the company level by means of "controlled decentralisation". The way to this is paved by opening clauses in collective agreements which allow deviations from the minimum level of the collective agreement at company level. In addition, a modular system with various modules instead of an entire collective bargaining package can be a solution approach, especially for small companies. Companies that are deterred by the complexity of an entire collective agreement should, for example, be able to opt for the pay framework from a collective agreement without having to adopt complex regulations on from this collective agreement at the same time.