Most of PPS Group Detva Employees Support Joining Strike

Detva, December 22 (TASR) – Employees of engineering company PPS Group Detva (Banska Bystrica region) on Thursday voted in favour of going on strike, according to a statement sent to TASR on the same day.

Almost 87 percent of the 800 employees of PPS Group Detva participated in the vote. Of these, 97.09 percent agreed to a strike and would fully support it. The company’s KOVO trade union will decide what to do next concerning this issue on Monday, January 2, 2017.

The trade union initiated the strike vote based on an assessment of the course and results of collective bargaining. Mediation proceedings held on December 9 failed to bring consensus on all points at issue in the draft collective agreement. Representatives of the parties concerned took part in nine rounds of negotiations between July 18-December 9, six of which were held with mediators present.

Ten points of the draft collective agreement have remained unresolved, including, for example, the trade union’s demand for severance payments exceeding the framework stipulated in the Labour Code, the issue of breaks for safety reasons, the creation and drawing of social funds, and salary growth in 2017.

In reaction to this, PPS Group spokesman Lubos Schwarzbacher told TASR that the company will initiate a meeting with KOVO’s company branch before the end of this year. “Most points at issue have been resolved during negotiations with mediators present, but a couple of them still remain open. Concerning these final points to be resolved, we’ve just received from a mediator a proposal for resolving them so that the collective agreement for 2017 can be signed,” stated Schwarzbacher, adding that individual points should be discussed at the joint meeting. Moreover, the current collective agreement is still in effect. “We still believe that we’ll eventually manage to come to an agreement,” he said.