Unions at
Volkswagen Slovakia said Sunday they were ending a six-day strike after
agreeing a 14.1 percent wage hike with management at the eurozone country’s
largest
private employer.
“We are
ending our strike,” trade union chief Zoroslav Smolinsky told journalists after
marathon negotiations with the bosses at the Bratislava plant.
VW
spokeswoman Lucia Kovarovic Makayova told AFP that the agreed 14.1 percent pay
rise will be made in three instalments and completed by November 2018.
Workers will
also get a one-off bonus of 500 euros and an extra day off, according to the
spokeswoman.
Currently,
the average salary in the Bratislava VW plant is 1,800 euros ($2,014),
excluding managers’ pay packets, according to the company.
Slovakia’s
average salary is 980 euros.
Workers
launched the strike on Tuesday after management rejected union demands for a 16
percent wage hike, offering an eight percent rise instead.
Smolinsky
said that up to 10,000 of the plant’s 12,300 employees downed tools for the
first time since production began at the site in 1992.
The strike
stopped the production of luxury SUVs like the Touareg or the Audi Q7.
Slovakia’s
leftist Prime Minister Robert Fico supported the workers’ wage demands.
“If we know
that there is the highest productivity and the highest quality in Bratislava,
they produce the most expensive cars in the whole company, why should workers
here earn one third of the salary of their (German) colleagues in the same
company?”, Fico told a local radio station on Saturday.
According to
the Slovak autoworkers union, the starting salary in German VW factories is
2,037 euros, while in Slovakia it is 679 euros.
The strike
was peaceful as workers laid down blankets, played cards and cooled off in a
fountain outside the VW plant amid a heatwave that saw temperatures soar to 30
degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) Bratislava in recent days.
The factory
produces more than 1,000 cars a day and a total 388,697 vehicles rolled off its
production line last year.
Models
include the luxury Porsche Cayenne, Volkswagen Touareg and Audi Q7 vehicles,
among others.
The new
Lamborghini Urus luxury cars will also be made using parts produced in
Bratislava.
The
five-millionth car produced in the plant rolled off the production line on June
15th. The white Touareg was produced for a customer in Australia.
Last year,
just over a million automobiles were produced in Slovakian factories owned by
Kia, Peugeot and VW.
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