Metallurgy has a new collective agreement

This text of a little over 230 pages, resulting from small negotiations initiated in 2016, will govern the rights of the 1.6 million workers in the sector.

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In metallurgy, the social partners have just carried out an extraordinary merger: that of the rules applicable to the 1.6 million workers in the sector. A new collective agreement was initialed on Monday, February 7, by three of the four representative trade union federations in the branch (CFDT, CFE-CGC, FO) and the Union of Metallurgy Industries and Crafts (UIMM), which defends the Interest of employers. Resulting from the negotiations initiated in 2016, the text lays a “common base” of provisions for “preparing” the 42,000 companies concerned at the “challenges” of today – whether it is the decarbonation of the productive model, increased international competition or labor shortages.

The signatories of the agreement have completed a Herculean task. Until now, metallurgy was covered by 76 territorial collective agreements, plus a convention specific to steel industry and another, of national scope for engineers and executives. Either some 7,000 pages that had been sedimented since the 1970s, forming a plentiful mille-leaf asillisible. Such a “stack” no longer corresponded to the “expectations” of the company leaders or those of the employees, and became the source of “legal insecurity”, as explained by Eric Trappier, the President of the UIMM, during the A ceremony held on Monday at the headquarters of his organization in Paris. “It was urgent to revisit our standards,” Book Gabriel Artero (CFE-CGC).

The parties in the presence have therefore been put around a table six years ago, passing to the sieve hundreds of rules on multiple themes: working time, compensation elements, social protection – notably in terms of PRESIDENT -, etc. “It was not a long calm river,” said Monday Hubert Mongon, the General Delegate of the UIMM. On several topics, such as “seniority premiums” or “recognition of diplomas”, the protagonists have crossed the iron, to say Frédéric HOMEZ (FO). Nevertheless, “everyone knew how to take a step towards the other,” completed Stéphane Destugues (CFDT).

“Virtuous social dialogue”

At the end of the process, the text, which has a little more than 230 pages, harmonizes the existing corpus of rules and will apply to all metallurgy workers from the beginning 2024. According to the CFDT, it Contains real advances: improvement of “guaranteed minimum remuneration” for more than three-quarters of people employed in the branch, 100% pay for individuals in sick leave (and this, up to six months), coverage Risks Incapacity, Disability and Death for all categories of staff … The classifications of positions have also been fully rebuccuated in order to take into consideration the evolution of trades and the diversity of skills.

present at the ceremony at the UIMM, the Minister of Labor, Elisabeth Borne, welcomed Monday the agreement found, seeing the demonstration of a “virtuous social dialogue” likely to “serve as an example to Other sectors “. However, the exercise is not completely completed: talks must continue at the territorial level to settle points that have not been addressed by the National Convention.

In a statement, the CGT Federation of Metallurgy has, once again, expressed on Monday, its hostility to the new “conventional device”, which is only a “toolbox for the benefit of employers to improve The financial competitiveness of companies “.

/Media reports.