At the beginning of this month, unions and employers agreed very quickly. All 330,000 supermarket employees suddenly gained 10 percent. But now that the unions have also allowed their members to vote on that final offer, there appears to be division. At CNV a large majority voted in favor, at FNV a majority rejected the proposal.
FNV was the first to report that result on Wednesday: 57 percent of the members were against. “So we will now first discuss with them what they want further and whether there is sufficient support to force employers back to the negotiating table with actions, so that we can continue to talk about a better collective labor agreement,” director Daniëlle Wink said in an explanation. .
Still, it is questionable whether those talks will take place, since almost 80 percent of the members at CNV supported the final offer. “So we’re just going to sign this,” said a spokesperson. In principle, employers only need to conclude an agreement with one trade union before entering into a collective labor agreement.
It was already clear at the start of the negotiations that FNV and CNV did not have the same commitment. CNV aimed for a short collective labor agreement to quickly tackle the loss of purchasing power among members, and started with a wage demand of 10 percent. FNV also wanted to negotiate other improvements with employers and set a higher target: 14.3 percent.
Read more about the strikes at Albert Heijn: ‘We will continue until all demands are met’
Two weeks flat
However, the negotiations did not last long. Immediately in the first consultation, the employers made an offer of 9 percent. The unions saw in this the fear of a repeat of the Albert Heijn scenario. That chain has a separate collective labor agreement for distribution employees, and when those negotiations ran smoothly this spring, strikers halted supplies to stores for almost two weeks.
After the employers’ final offer, director Wink, unlike her CNV colleagues, did not yet dare to anticipate the vote among members. On the one hand, there was surprisingly quickly “a good wage offer,” she said at the time. But the question remained: “How important are those substantive points for our supporters?”
According to Wink, one of the reasons for rejecting the wage offer now is that no agreements have been made in the proposal about lowering the age at which employees receive the adult wage. In addition, the FNV members want the Sunday allowance to return and better agreements to be made about tackling the workload in the sector.