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IBM may dance to German trade union tunes

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CIOL Bureau
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FRANKFURT: Germany's powerful IG Metall trade union, said that it had won a legal battle with U.S. computer giant International Business Machines Corp. to negotiate on behalf of IBM's 26,000 employees in Germany.



A Frankfurt tribunal ruled that IBM, must deal with the hardline engineering union as well as the huge services union, Verdi, in negotiating pay.



The company had said it would only talk to Verdi.



"IBM must finally accept reality," IG Metall leader Juergen Peters said in a statement.



IBM declined immediate comment, saying it needed time to study the judgment.



Peters, a hardliner, was chosen as leader of Germany's second-largest union at the weekend amid bitter internal wrangling over who was to blame for a failed campaign for a shorter working week in eastern Germany -- IG Metall's first unsuccessful strike in decades.



German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, exploited the union's crisis to question Germany's tradition of national collective wage bargaining, suggesting pay deals be struck at regional or company level instead.



But with IG Metall's next round of wage negotiations for its 2.6 million members due to kick off in December, Peters said at the weekend any move to change the practice would be met with fierce opposition, and did not rule out industrial action.



IG Metall was once Europe's biggest union but has seen a sharp decline in membership in the last decade.



© Reuters

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