After years of negotiations, a new single collective bargaining agreement for the French metallurgy sector was signed on February 7, 2022.
New Collective Bargaining Agreement in the Metallurgy Sector
The new French collective bargaining agreement streamlines the regulations applicable in the metallurgy sector. Currently, the sector is regulated by 76 regional agreements and a separate agreement for non-executive employees of the steel industry and a separate agreement for engineers and executives.
The metallurgy industry will now have a common ground of rules and principles applicable throughout the territory, applicable to all employees, managerial and non-managerial.
The new CBA will concern 42,000 companies with 1.6 million employees.
What changes with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement of the Metallurgy?
The new collective bargaining agreement of the metallurgy contains provisions regarding working time, employee benefits like social protection, as well as job classifications with an associated minimum salary grid.
Social protection
The new CBA enhances the social protection. It sets minimum guarantees for health and welfare protection. This concerns all employees, executives and non-executives. Many companies will now have to review their insurance contracts.
Job classifications
The new CBA contains a new single classification grid with associated minimum salaries for executives and non-executives employees. Each job will be evaluated by six different criteria (complexity of the job, knowledge and expertise required, autonomy etc.). For each of these six criteria the required level will be assessed on a scale from one to ten.
Example: in terms of knowledge and expertise, a degree 2 ‘requires elementary knowledge’, while a degree 9 ‘requires highly specialized knowledge in a field’.
Based on the total number of points of the six criteria, the job will then be classified in a new grid of 18 coefficients: from A1 to I18. Each coefficient is associated to a minimum salary.
The job classification belongs to the obligatory mentions on the French payslip.
Effective date of the new collective bargaining agreement of the metallurgy
Companies will be required to apply the new regulations regarding social protection from 1st of January 2023, and the new job classifications and minimum salaries from 1st of January 2024.
What about local specificities in the steel and metallurgy industry?
The new national CBA does not deal with all local specificities.
Thus, the local organizations have until June 30, 2022 to negotiate the significant differences and sign autonomous agreements for what could not be harmonized at national level.
Source:
CFDT official communication