After the IG BCE union announced industrial action at Adidas
Adidas voluntarily pays higher salaries than the collective bargaining agreement stipulates and has also granted an increase that is 0.5 points larger than that negotiated in the current collective bargaining round, the company said.
The union sharply criticized the abandonment of the collective agreement in the summer and offered to negotiate an in-house collective agreement. Adidas has not yet addressed this. The union has now decided to initiate industrial action, as its chairman Michael Vassiliadis said on Monday.
Adidas sees salaries as attractive
Adidas, which often makes it into the top ten most attractive employers in relevant rankings, sees the pay offered as good. From December 2025, salaries for the 4,600 Adidas employees in Germany will rise between 3 and 4.5 percent depending on the pay group, plus one-off payments and regulations for trainees.
Adidas CFO Harm Ohlmeyer accused the union of “pure populism”. “The aim here is to specifically damage Adidas’ reputation through false accusations in order to achieve union goals,” said Ohlmeyer. Adidas had already justified its withdrawal from the collective bargaining agreement in the summer with what the company considered to be a lack of flexibility in the collective bargaining structure.
Industrial action announced
The IG BCE rejected the reasoning in the summer as “nonsense”. At the trade union congress in Hanover, its chairman Vassiliadis announced that he wanted to force Adidas back into collective bargaining with industrial action.
The union will use its entire international network for this, as well as “the entire range that the supply chain law offers,” said the union leader, without providing any specific information. First, collective bargaining committee members are to be elected at the Franconian production sites in Uffenheim and Scheinfeld.