For a month, employees at six university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia have been on strike for a collective agreement that guarantees them better working conditions. A solution is now emerging: the cabinet is initiating the necessary change to the Higher Education Act. This should make direct collective bargaining possible.
The North Rhine-Westphalian state government wants to pave the way for a collective agreement to relieve the employees of the university clinics. To do this, the Higher Education Act in North Rhine-Westphalia must be changed. As the ministries for culture and science and health announced on Thursday, the state cabinet has decided on a formulation aid and is making it available to the state parliamentary groups for parliamentary consultation.
The amendment to the Higher Education Act is necessary to allow the six university hospitals in Bonn, Aachen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen and Münster to withdraw from the state employers’ association (AdL NRW). Only in this way can the clinic management conduct independent collective bargaining.
For many weeks, the specialists and nursing staff at the university hospitals have been fighting together with the Verdi union for a collective agreement that is intended to guarantee them better working conditions with precisely defined staffing levels. Extensive strike measures have been going on in the clinics for a good four weeks. In the meantime, there have been several discussions with the employers without them submitting an offer.
After the decision of the collective bargaining community of German states (TdL) on May 2nd to reject a corresponding application from the state, the clinics are barred from collective bargaining because of their AdL membership. “It is our declared goal to enable collective bargaining to effectively relieve the burden on specialist and nursing staff at the university hospitals,” said the independent Science Minister Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen. “Since the TdL refuses to negotiate its own, the withdrawal of the clinics from the employers’ association is the only option for this.”
With the proposed amendment to the Higher Education Act, the state government is paving the way for an agreement on a collective bargaining agreement and is keeping its word. Pfeiffer-Poensgen: “I’m confident that collective bargaining can start soon, which will hopefully lead to an improvement in the situation for the staff at our university hospitals in North Rhine-Westphalia.”
According to Minister of Labor and Health Karl-Josef Laumann, it is imperative that the university hospitals leave the AdL. “There was no other way to pave the way for collective bargaining,” said the CDU politician. You have “done your homework so that there can be noticeable improvements and relief for the employees”. According to Laumann, further negotiations are now a matter for the parties to the collective agreement. He hopes that for all sides – the employees, the clinics and the patients – “reasonable agreements can be reached very soon”.
In addition to leaving the AdL, the change in the law should also enable the establishment of a separate employers’ association for the NRW university hospitals. At the same time, it is to be ensured that, in addition to the additional relief collective agreement, the employees will continue to remain in the current collective agreements of the state until the conclusion of new collective agreements by the new employers’ association. In the future, too, the aim is to prevent clinic employees from being treated less favorably than other state employees.
