“Normally we want an improvement in purchasing power,” Kager said. That’s why he describes wage requirements where inflation is kept high but employees don’t really improve as ‘moderate’.
Purchasing power is what FNV is all about. This means workers should see their wages rise by at least inflation, the union believes.
In September, FNV had already claimed to take on automatic price compensation, but the exact wage requirement for 2023 is now known.
For this, FNV has been waiting for the October inflation data. This morning, CBS data showed that life in October 14.3 per cent it was more expensive than in the same month last year.
Wage increases are now often even lower than inflation
Incidentally, significantly lower wage increases have been agreed in the collective bargaining agreements already concluded in our country this year.
For example, negotiated wages for collective bargaining agreements concluded in September have increased on average 4.4 percentaccording to the AWVN (Algemene Werkgeversvereniging Nederland), which is involved in most of all 850 collective bargaining agreements in the Netherlands.
Incidentally, there are collective bargaining agreements where much higher wage increases have been agreed. Here’s how you get it NS staff added 9.25%plus twice a one-time payment of 1000 euros.
Sometimes the wage demand is even higher
A salary increase has already been agreed for some employees, for 2022 or 2023, but at a time when inflation was still much lower than it is today. FNV wants to compensate those employees. As a result, the wage requirement for some sectors and companies before 2023 or after could be even higher than the 14.3 percent that FNV now assumes in principle.
Moreover, when the discussions for these collective bargaining agreements were underway, inflation was still considerably lower, so the sharp rise in prices we are experiencing could not be taken into account.
But it is not yet fully known what this “certain form of retrieval indexing will look like,” says FNV spokesman José Kager.
We will update later
Fortunately, many companies can afford a substantial wage increase as well, according to FNV. FNV wants to see how to recover from high inflation at a later time for companies or sectors in difficulty and therefore unable to cope with a substantial increase in wages. “But we want to prevent all kinds of companies from saying they can’t pay the wage claim,” says Kager.
FNV concludes a collective bargaining agreement for a total of 5-6 million employees, says Kager. Several hundred collective bargaining agreements for several million employees will expire next year, he says. The collective labor agreement for general hospitals, for example, already involves more than 200,000 employees. Negotiations are now underway.
CNV
The CNV union said in mid-September that it will focus on a salary requirement from 5 to 10 percent. That wage requirement is still current, according to spokesman Kees de Vos.
According to De Vos, CNV wants as much automatic price compensation as possible. “We think this is a more realistic way to start negotiations. But we are looking at what is feasible for collective bargaining. Sometimes even a wage increase of over 10 percent is possible.”
In this video you can see why a steep wage increase only makes inflation worse:
