German postal workers may win minimum wage

German postal workers may be subject to a minimum wage from early next year after the ruling coalition parties reached a late-night deal to extend basic pay levels, Labor Minister Franz Muentefering said.
Muentefering said he expects postal services employers and the Ver.di labor union to agree this year on a minimum wage, a precondition for the government to make the pay level binding for postal workers across the country as a whole.
“If postal services and labor unions come to us and say they’ve agreed on a minimum wage, then we, as the coalition, want to put this in place quickly,” Muentefering told reporters in Berlin today. “I assume that we can start the necessary legal measures already this year and possibly have a minimum wage for the entire postal sector in place very early in 2008.”
A statutory minimum wage may be good news for Deutsche Post AG, Europe’s biggest postal service, as it prepares for the end of its letter-delivery monopoly, its most profitable business, on Jan. 1. The company has forecast domestic competition will trim earnings at its mail division by as much as 20 percent by 2009. Minimum wage regulations would also apply to competitors such as Pin AG.
“The postal monopoly will be phased out, that can’t be changed, but we’ll introduce a minimum wage and that’s something we can get done this autumn,” Muentefering said.
Muentefering, who is also vice chancellor, reaffirmed the government can’t act on its own and needs collective bargaining partners to come up with a minimum wage proposal first.