Spring wage round: Unions demand fair salaries for everyone!

Spring wage round: Unions demand fair salaries for everyone!

An exciting time is imminent for Austrian industry, because the spring wage round will be heralded next Wednesday! First of all, the paper industry with its 8,000 employees will take negotiations. The following Friday is followed by the electrical and electronics industry, which counts over 60,000 employees. The following week, the talks for 50,000 employees in the chemical industry begin, and the glass industry will graduate on May 20 with 7,000 employees. A rolling inflation of 2.8 percent is used as a starting basis, such as krone.at reported.

The unions Pro-GE and GPA have already clearly signaled that they reject zero wages. "Nullln rounds do not save the business location. On the contrary, a functioning economy needs people who have enough money to buy products and consume services," explained the top negotiators Reinhold Binder and Karl Dürtscher in a joint sentence. In the textile industry, which includes around 7,500 employees, there will be no wage negotiations this year, since changes for 2025 were already agreed in the previous year. Here, the collective agreement minimum wages will increase by 0.3 percent to over 2000 euros from April 1st.

negotiations in other sectors and innovations in the language

The progress that some industries have already made is particularly impressive; For example, the 12,000 bus drivers will retrospectively enjoy a real increase in real wage from 1.6 percent from January 1 after five rounds of negotiations. At the same time, there are new trends in gender-friendly language, such as Sekada.de explained. Companies are asked to use gender -friendly names, be it through pair forms such as "employee", through neutral terms or through innovative spellings with a slash or large "i".

The current wage round and the discussion about gender -friendly language are two important topics that will significantly influence the economic and social standards in Austria. The upcoming negotiations could thus represent an important step towards more even payment and social inclusion.