Employees at Airbus's German plants will strike on 7 October after talks with the management about terms and conditions were suspended yesterday.
The local IG Metall union announced that it called on 16,000 employees at the manufacturer's four sites in Hamburg, Bremen, Stade and Buxtehude to undertake a one-day strike.
The walkout is to begin at 9:15am local time and will cover three shifts.
After failing to achieve a temporary injunction against industrial action last week, Airbus threatened that strikes could influence its plans to allocate more final assembly capacity for A320-family aircraft to Hamburg as this might lead to a "loss of trust" in the German sites.
A central point of disagreement between the management, employees and union is the use of temporary staff.
Airbus currently employs around 3,500 temporary staff members (22%) at the four plants, according to IG Metall. The union wants to limit this quota to 15%.
Giving employees a greater say in the organisation and optimisation of work processes is another issue where no agreement could yet be reached. Contract negotiations have been underway for more than a year.
Airbus wants to increase the productivity of the four sites until 2020. While the employee side is willing to contribute, there is disagreement over the calculation method and hence the potential for the efficiency improvements.
The airframer plans to make savings worth around €123 million ($164 million) every year until 2020, according to IG Metall. The union added that, from the second year onwards, this would see the cost base being cut by another €123 million, after it had already been reduced by that amount during the previous year. In total, the cuts would ammount to around €5.5 billion.
IG Metall wants to make productivity improvements, which lead to a similar annual savings. However, this would be calculated across the next eight years and lead to total savings of around €1.1 billion.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
