Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

ALEKSANDRA JANOVSKAIA
other productive investment, making Central
European subsidiaries highly competitive
production locations within the VW group.
Local management was the main driver in
the industrial modernisation process, while
unions were the facilitators. Collective
agreements cover the issues of overtime, shift
organisation and time accounts. Working
time and work organisation are two crucial
fields, in addition to wages, where unions
have had legal rights to be consulted and be
taken into account. The case of Audi Györ is
the clearest example of union-management
cooperation for upgrading. The cooperation
only materialised once management saw an
advantage in concluding the agreement. It has
been looking for a ‘win-win situation’ before
engaging in serious collective bargaining. Thus,
collective negotiations took place for six years
without an agreement and only in 2001, when
the Hungarian employment law was amended
introducing more possibilities for negotiating
working time flexibility, did management
became serious about collective bargaining and
the first deal was struck. The manager explained
how introduction of this time flexibility was
fostered by changes in labour law that made
such an agreement with unions possible and
how this allowed the company to save costs:
‘Before we had to pay overtime, once we had
the collective agreement longer working time
periods could be used. […] This was the most
important reason for us [management] to have
this collective agreement’ (Interview August
2007). What these collective agreements
allow is a very high level of working time
flexibility and thus better use of machines
and productive investment. The Audi HR
manager stated that ‘there are 70 working time
models here. It has been very important for
our company to be able to be flexible, ‘to play’
with working time’ (Interview August 2007).
Yet also in other subsidiaries, the collective
agreements have been used by management
more intensively since the late 1990s-early
2000s to achieve the necessary flexibility in
working time, shift structure, etc. Thus, also
in Škoda and in VW Slovakia, management
used collective agreements as a flexibility tool.
HR director at VW Slovakia put ‘enormous
flexibility’ as one of the key reasons for the
success of VW Slovakia: ‘I don’t know if there
is another firm in the group that has such a
high level of flexibility. […] The workers work
normal number of hours, but they also work
Saturdays, Sundays’ (Interview March 2007).
The shift system has been changed from a
three-shift to a four-shift to a continuous shift
system. The latter allows a more intensive use
of machines and people. This ‘flexibility’ that
is praised by management has been possible
due to company level collective agreements
between management and trade unions.
According to labour law and collective
agreements in Škoda, most working time
flexibility measures need to be agreed with
unions. Thus, to introduce new working time
systems for the period of one year, agreement
with trade unions is required. Also working
time systems that extend the work week to the
weekend are agreed with trade unions
two months in advance (Škoda 2005:
18-20). Similarly, in VW Slovakia, all
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important changes in shift systems
are agreed with unions. The collective
agreements create a limit of weekly and annual
over-time thus effectively allowing for working
time accounts. In terms of work organisation,