After a short fourth round of negotiations, the employer and the trade union agreed on a new collective agreement for around 415,000 employees and 15,000 apprentices in retail. The starting salary will be increased to 1,800 euros gross from January 1, 2022. This increases the salaries for young professionals by 3.45 percent. For everyone else there is a salary increase of 2.55 percent.
That results in an average weighted increase of 2.8 percent, said the chief union negotiator Anita Palkovich of the GPA at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “In the end it was a mixture of crisis and future deal,” said Palkovich. The employer representative described the agreement as a “strong signal”.
The guideline for the KV negotiations is the inflation rate. Inflation from October 2020 to September 2021 in Austria was 2.1 percent. In October inflation rose to 3.7 percent, the highest level in 13 years.
