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Residential services: Feedback on third day of negotiations on new collective labor agreement

December 05 2024

On Wednesday 4 December 2024 we had our third negotiation day for a new collective labour agreement for Housing Services. In this newsletter we inform you about the course of this negotiation day.

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The third day of negotiations

In our previous newsletter we told you that we had established five clusters of topics for the negotiations. Cluster 4 (Social Security), cluster 1 (Individual Choice Budget) and a first start of cluster 2 (Working Conditions for Different Groups, including Generation Pact) were on the agenda for 3 December.

We finally really got into the content on the third day of negotiations. We discussed many topics in a good atmosphere, but unfortunately we have not yet made many concrete agreements.

Cluster 1 – Social Security

Both trade unions and employers consider social safety to be an important issue.

For us it is important that employers not only take measures to counter the consequences of social insecurity, but first focus on the cause of the emergence of socially unsafe situations. We advocate that employers review their work processes – and adjust them where necessary – on aspects that can provoke or trigger, cause or worsen incidents and/or unsafe situations.

In order to direct employers' focus on the source of socially unsafe situations, we have made a number of proposals to be included in the collective labour agreement.

Although employers agree with us to focus more on the source of socially unsafe situations, they wonder whether the collective labor agreement is the right place to make agreements about this.

Ultimately, we agreed to address this topic in our social training fund FLOW. Part of this will be an information campaign that should help employers (and employees) to a good and effective focus on social safety. The unions will make a text proposal for this information campaign. We will coordinate this further with each other in the next round of negotiations.

Cluster 2 – Individual Choice Budget

On December 4th we exchanged several ideas to give the IKB more body. Ultimately, De Unie and her fellow unions indicated that they agree with the proposal of employers to take the holiday pay, the end-of-year bonus and the statutory leave days as sources for the IKB in any case. On the condition that the IKB is of a higher level.

By a higher level we mean that the financial size of the IKB will be larger than it is now. This can be done with an additional contribution from the employer, but also by increasing the end-of-year bonus, for example. We have asked employers to come up with a proposal for this.

In addition, we want the number of goals that are included in the IKB to be increased. We have made a number of suggestions to employers for this. We will return to this in the 5th round of negotiations.

Cluster 3 – Working conditions for different groups

We decided to hold the discussion on the Generation Pact during the fourth round of negotiations on 11 December 2024. Because we want to do this thoroughly, and the remaining time on 4 December was too short for this.

Other topics in this cluster on which we as trade unions have made proposals relate to parental leave, additional maternity leave, the length of a consecutive holiday, working after the AOW retirement age, etc.

We have reached agreement with the employers on a number of proposals. With a number of other proposals, the employers first want to sort out a few things (for example, the fiscal consequences of a certain arrangement).

It would take us too far to go into all the proposals in this newsletter. Ultimately, the proposals on which we have reached agreement will be reflected in any negotiation result that we achieve.

Fourth day of negotiations will be crucial

The main topics for the next negotiation day, on December 11, 2024, are wages and the generation pact. In the slipstream of that, we will probably also discuss other topics that cost wage space on December 11. Think for example of our proposal to improve the travel allowance.

As you have read before, we have not made many concrete agreements yet. This must happen on the subjects of wages and generation pact, if we want to reach a negotiation result for a new collective labor agreement. The fourth round of negotiations will therefore be crucial!

The sequel

The fourth round of negotiations is therefore on Wednesday 11 December 2024. We have also scheduled the evening for negotiations on that day. Hopefully we will make serious progress with our new collective labour agreement on 11 December. On 12 December we will inform the members about the progress of the negotiation day.

Questions or remarks?

If you have any questions or comments about this message, please contact the advocate Hans Korver via hans.korver@unie.nl or call 06-5252 2073.

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