Unions plan to work in chemical companies

Trade unions ACV, ABVV and ACLVB announce notice of strike action at all Belgian chemical companies. They said they did so because the umbrella chemical organization Esencia abruptly left negotiations on a new sectoral agreement on Friday evening. Trade unions and Essenscia have been in talks to reach a new sectoral agreement since the end of September.

It is not yet clear what procedures will be organized and where. However, union activists will gather on Tuesday at the entrance to the Essenscia event in Brussels.

“In itself we were negotiating constructively,” ACVBIE’s Quinn de Kinder explains. They have already indicated that they did not see the Corona bonus in 2021. In addition, they only wanted to grant wage increases from 2022. It will then happen within a small margin. If Essenscia wants to renegotiate, we will suspend our actions.

In response, Essencia said she was not pleased with the notice of the general strike. According to Essenscia, there was an attractive package on the table for a strong sectoral agreement, but unions came up with additional requirements related to the Corona bonus just before the agreement was concluded. “A slap in the face,” Quinn Linens puts it in Essencia.

According to the Sector Confederation, the package consists of a maximum implementation of the wage standard, additional efforts to significantly increase the sectoral minimum wage, additional investments in training and education, wage increases for non-traditional companies and more interest in practical work. .

Essenscia says he’s not against the corona bonus per se, but he wants it company-wide. For example, companies that have done well during the Corona crisis can choose to do so themselves. The umbrella organization says: “The demand for Corona’s bonus for all employees in the sector ignores the economic reality in which many companies in the sector are located, which have faced difficulty in this and are still suffering from it.”

The sectoral agreement in the chemical industry is renegotiated every two years. Now that no sectoral agreement has been reached, the next step is for the social partners within the companies to begin talks to negotiate a collective labor agreement tailored to the company,” Lenins concludes.