IBM Deutschland, which had threatened to move chip production out of West Germany over the issue, has won exemption from the state government of Baden-Wurttemberg from labour laws that ban Sunday working in the Federal Republic to operate its 1M-bit memory chip lines at Sindelfingen seven days a week: the company still has to overcome opposition from the IG Metall metalworkers’ union, which sees the exemption as the thin end of the wedge; IBM points out that it has to start shut-down procedures on Friday, and that when it starts again on Monday the ovens take five or six hours to reach optimum temperature; as a result reject rates are much higher on Monday, and at present, the proportion of output, 20% to 30%, that has to be disposed of as scrap metal, is in excess of the maxima for waste metal set by the state’s environmental laws; the concession allows IBM to operate on Sunday for a month, comparing reject rates and scrap with those for last month.
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