ING: New offer from ING, what exactly does it mean?

New opening offer from ING, especially old wine in new bottles.
Today ING published the new opening bid for the collective labor agreement negotiations. A month ago, as collaborating trade associations, we presented ING with a white paper with 1300 submissions, followed last Thursday, November 10 by the public presentation of a petition signed by 6766 employees. More than 500 colleagues attended this handover. When receiving the petition, the HR director spoke promising words. ING took this seriously and saw it necessary to take steps in the proposal that would be released on Monday 14 November. Our hearts were therefore beating with anticipation, to express it in the spirit of this time.

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But we are beyond disappointed. Although ING makes it appear that the proposal is a major step forward, that is a misrepresentation. We'll go through the financial adjustments one by one below:

• Salary increase 2023 – unchanged. ING offers a salary increase of 2023% for 3,0. This is unchanged from the previous proposal.
• Salary increase 2024 – a conversion at best, but a setback for many
  ING offers a salary increase of 2024% for 4,0. That is one percent increase compared to the previous proposal. On the other hand, the CMU (maximum € 1.950) will be abolished in ING's proposal. Remember that 1% with an average ING salary is about € 700 and you can see that that is certainly not an improvement. The measure also works to the disadvantage of the lower salary groups. 1% of € 35.000 or 1% of € 150.000 saves quite a bit.

• Guarantee 1,5% periodic lower half scale – worsening compared to now
  Originally, ING wanted to make the entire scale movement discretionary between 0 and 3%. We indicated that this means a deterioration for a large part of the employees. ING now comes with a guarantee of 1,5% for the lower half of the scale, but that is still a deterioration, because the guaranteed individual increase is now at 3,0% or 2,5%. Incidentally, the collective labor agreement stipulates that the current system will be followed in 2023 unless a new one has been agreed.

• Increase budget periodically - not for everyone, arbitrary and not permanent
  ING initially wanted to implement the proposed change to the system for periodic budget neutrality, but is now willing to do so by half. In any case, they would like to move to more discretionary steps, as evidenced by the proposal to adjust the maximum increase for horizontal transfer or promotion. The trade unions welcome a faster movement through the scale, but the proposal means that not everyone translates their development into the learning curve see in a salary step. In addition, with a budgeted periodical, the danger of arbitrariness is lurking. There are no objective criteria to name, because there is not enough available to give everyone the maximum. Furthermore, a budget system offers no guarantees for the future. We experienced this firsthand three years ago.

• One-off payment of € 2000 or € 500.
  The offer of EUR 2.000 gross is now allocated by ING to a slightly larger target group. However, this is a one-off payment while the members prefer a structural salary increase.

• Homework allowance
  ING offers a homeworking allowance, but not with retroactive effect. While we have been working from home for a long time and have never received compensation for it. You could deduce from the communicated proposal that we are going to 3 euros per home working day, that is not the case now. ING undertakes to use the maximum fiscal space, up to a maximum of 3 euros per day. For 2023, that is € 2,13 per day worked from home.

The only small progress we see in the offer is the additional leave arrangements for parents. This proposal concerns a small group of employees and pays no attention to the resulting further increase in work pressure. Not a word is said about the latter in the proposal, while Maarten van Beek indicated during his speech that it was clear that ING had to do something about this.

All in all, the new offer can be described as a polished version of the previous offer and does not in any way represent the steps that ING promised us last Thursday, November 10.

How further?

With inflation still raging high and in light of the announced dividend plans, ING is once again showing that it only cares about the shareholder interest. The employees are a cost center and they should not complain. We can only see the new opening offer and especially the misleading packaging as an outright insult to the employees who manage to work around with an ever-increasing workload to offer ING's customers a distinctive customer experience and thereby make ING successful .

It will come as no surprise that we as trade unions, after consulting the executives, see no reason in the new offer to resume negotiations next Thursday. ING did not hear us well enough.

Next Tuesday, November 22 at noon, we invited ING to Leeuwarden

We assume that the employees in Leeuwarden are just as important to ING as the colleagues in Amsterdam and that the NL management will speak to the employees there. Make sure you're there and bring all your colleagues. Then we show that it is also felt in Leeuwarden that employees have been dangling at the bottom for too long.

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