Employees at Digital Equipment Deutschland GmbH could go on strike after last week’s preliminary court hearing in Munich on DEC’s cancellation of its labour contract showed the two parties unable to resolve the deadlock. At the hearing, the union refused DEC’s offer to reinstate the original Tarifvertrag without its stipulations on severance pay. Payments package conditions are never part of a Tarifvertrag, said Digital Equipment GmbH spokeswoman Theresia Wermelskirchen. Nonetheless, the severance pay formula is part of the hybrid Tarifvertrag that DEC negotiated just a year ago, and, under German and international law, a contract is binding, said DEC works council vice-chairman Wigand Cramer. The employees are quite upset. There is also a resignation in them because the trust is gone. If DEC withdraws its cancellation, we can negotiate everything, even this year, Cramer said, noting that any renegotiation would not normally have been possible until January 1 1995. But we won’t negotiate with nothing in hand. Reanhard Kiel, wage rate secretary at the IG-Metall trade union’s headquarters in Frankfurt and a member of DEC’s Aufsichtsrat (supervisory committee made up of management and union members), is more adamant. It’s illegal what [DEC] did and, if we cannot find an arrangement, we will go on strike, he said. Cramer said the works council expects management to announce the number of staff cuts for the next fiscal year in the first two weeks of September. Depending on their decision, the union will respond, he said, adding that in Germany, it usually starts with a warning strike. The vice-chairman also noted, however, that both sides are aware that there has to be a reasonable solution. It is obvious, says Cramer, that if DEC has to lay off 2,000 people it is not possible for them to pay such sums for redundancy packages. Unfortunately, for the time being, the gap remains to be bridged. The court has set the first trial date for April 4 1995 and has asked DEC to produce documents from an independent source to prove its assertion that the package in the Tarifvertrag would put it in dire financial straits. Until the trial date, DEC can continue trying to negotiate less expensive redundancy packages on a case-by-case basis, Wermelskirchen said. The court seems to be in agreement that we were right, that we could cancel the social plan, that we were in financial difficulty and must be permitted to get out of it, and thus, that it was not an illegal step we took, she said. The spokeswoman said she does not know what new pay-off formula DEC is offering, only that it is less than the previous package, which cost the company, on average, the equivalent of $125,000 per surplus employee. – Marsha Johnston
