On a daily basis, we as works councils and trade unions experience the meaning of internationalisation in companies and in collective bargaining: The companies of our industrial sector have already been co-operating beyond borders for a long time, to open new markets for their products, to achieve financial advantages through outsourcing and dislocation or cheaper suppliers.

We all know the employers’ argument often put forward in company-wide negotiations that competitors are “cheaper”. This strategy to play employees of one sector off against each other and therefore to increase the pressure on wages and working conditions, was the main reason, why colleagues in the agricultural technology industry in Germany started to organise themselves and to create the network agricultural technology already more than 10 years ago. Today, most of the approximately 30.000 employees of this sector in Germany are represented in the network. Since 1996, it has strongly grown together and has one simple objective:

We won’t work against each other, but together, for example if issues like extending working time or other forms of increased flexibility (e.g. temporary employment) are demanded by employers. Together, we are stronger! And we have a common mission. „Better instead of cheaper“ is important.

For the exchange of experiences and development of common strategies, to co-ordinate our demands and to make them public, the network agricultural technology has achieved a lot of things: More than a dozen of sector seminars as a platform for employee representatives to exchange ideas and develop common concepts has been carried out so far.

But there is more than just the organisation of conferences and meetings.

An important date of the network was the year 2004 when a common declaration was adopted, in which a common strategy of the employees is formulated to collective bargaining politics. This „Declaration of Münster“ was an important step (an English translation can be found in the download section).