CROSS-BORDER SOCIAL DIALOGUE AND AGREEMENTS: An ...

Transnational collective bargaining at company level – da Costa and Rehfeldt
cases of job reductions, which had led to competing national employment
security agreements, this time the EWC refused the logic of local
negotiations pitting one site against another, and adopted a strategy of
transnational solidarity, including both mobilization and negotiation. On
25 January 2001, the employees of nearly all GM plants in Europe took
part in a common strike and an “action day” against plant closures. This
put pressure on negotiations, which led to an agreement stipulating that
management would avoid forced redundancies. Negotiated alternatives
with local employee representatives included part-time work programmes,
voluntary severance programmes, and early retirement programmes,
as well as transfers to other GM locations. Vehicle production
(though not car production) was to be maintained in Luton.
A third framework agreement between GM Europe management
and the EWC was signed in October 2001, after the announcement of
further job cuts known as the “Olympia plan”, which aimed to reduce
capacity at GM Opel, Vauxhall and Saab plants. Both sides came to a
common understanding, which meant that the EWC accepted the productivity
objectives of the Olympia plan but that management committed
itself to implementing the capacity adjustments without plant closures
and without forced redundancies.
Yet in September 2004, GM Europe management announced its
intention to close a production site and in October, to cut 12,000 jobs
in Europe. The EMF established a “European trade union coordination
group” — composed of members of the EMF secretariat, representatives
of the national unions involved, as well as members of the GM EWC —
which adopted a common action programme and called for a European
day of action for 19 October 2004, in which 50,000 GM workers took
part. The agreement signed in December by GM Europe management,
the EMF, national unions and the GM EWC recognized the economic
problems faced by GM and its need to reduce costs and jobs, but reaffirmed
the “no forced redundancies” and “no plant closures” principles of
the previous agreements, according to the strategy of “sharing the burden”,
in the words of the German president of the GM EWC, Klaus Franz.
In June 2006, GM Europe management announced the closure of
the Azambuja plant in Portugal. Despite a series of coordinated actions
in all European plants, and GM’s promise to negotiate a new European
agreement, the plant was shut down (Bartmann, 2005; Bartmann and
Blum-Geenen, 2006; da Costa and Rehfeldt, 2006a and 2007).
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