According to Ver.di, 68 employees at 68 Kaufhof branches throughout Germany will be leaving work on Thursday, as will employees in 16 branches of Karstadt Sports and in some of Karstadt Feinkost's branches. With the industrial action the union wants to lend its demands to the collective bargaining on Thursday and Friday.
"The employees at Kaufhof, but also Karstadt, are angry, they demand that there is finally a secure collectively agreed solution for the future of the department store and their jobs and that the exhausting hanging has an end," said the Ver.di negotiator Orhan Akman. A spokesman for the department store group initially did not want to comment.
Ver.di and Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof have been negotiating for some time on a joint restructuring collective agreement for the new department store giant created by the merger. According to Ver.di, a merger without a new collective agreement would automatically mean an approximately eleven percent reduction in pay for Kaufhof employees. This causes great unrest among the employees.
Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof had already proposed a solution in the past that would not be so great for the Kaufhof employees and would even bring more money to Karstadt employees. Ver.di, too, had indicated the willingness to make concessions. However, the positions of the two sides are apparently still far from each other. This applies not only to the future wage level, but also to the question of how long a new restructuring collective agreement should apply.
Kaufhof has been part of a joint venture with former archrival Karstadt for a year. The owner is the Austrian Signa Group of real estate investor Rene Benko.
