From 2025, the employees in the Saxon plant will work three hours less per week than today.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin For the approximately 4,300 employees at the Porsche plant in Leipzig, the 35-hour week will apply from 2025. IG Metall and the sports car manufacturer have agreed on this in a future collective agreement that has been approved by the company’s supervisory board. Accordingly, the weekly working time will be reduced to 36.5 hours in a first step from January next year. The 35-hour week will then apply from January 2025.
The IG Metall Berlin-Brandenburg-Sachsen has thus come a step further in its endeavor to reduce the collectively agreed working hours in the East German metal and electrical industry to the western level. The 35-hour week has been in effect in West Germany since October 1995, while people work three hours longer in the East.
In the last collective bargaining round, the union therefore demanded a collective adjustment allowance in order to achieve at least partial financial compensation for longer working hours for the employees.
She had backed up her demands with massive warning strikes, which she continued with the approval of the headquarters in Frankfurt even after the successful pilot degree in North Rhine-Westphalia.
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In this way, she was able to conclude initial agreements on harmonizing working hours at company level during the ongoing collective bargaining round. And after taking on the pilot degree, IG Metall agreed with the employers’ associations from Berlin-Brandenburg (VME) and Saxony (VSME) on a collective bargaining framework for future harmonization agreements.
Collective framework for company agreements on working hours
This framework was important to the union so that the costs for the adjustment of working hours could not be unilaterally dumped on the employees – for example by deleting vacation or Christmas bonuses or other tariff modules. According to IG Metall, the weekly working hours at Porsche are being reduced with full wages and without any wage cuts.
As early as May, the union had agreed step-by-step plans for the way to the 35-hour week at Volkswagen in Saxony and at the automotive suppliers SAS in Meerane and ZF in Brandenburg an der Havel, followed later by Mahle in Wustermark.
“Historic success for the people in East Germany.”
(Photo: imago images / tagesspiegel)
Birgit Dietze, the head of the IG Metall district of Berlin-Brandenburg-Saxony, called the agreement at Porsche “trend-setting” for the metal and electrical industry. “The socio-political result is also a historic success for the people in East Germany.”
During the collective bargaining round, the union was able to win well-known political supporters for their demand, including the Prime Ministers of Brandenburg and Thuringia, Dietmar Woidke (SPD) and Bodo Ramelow (left), or the head of the Green parliamentary group Anton Hofreiter.
More than 30 years after the fall of the Wall, Porsche employees in Leipzig would finally be treated in the same way as their colleagues in the West when it came to working hours, said Knut Lofski, Chairman of the Works Council in Leipzig. “For many years, our colleagues at the plant have been working just as flexibly and productively as in the West. We are finally on an equal footing in the Porsche family. “