Unions ALEBA, LCGB and OGBL on Thursday signed an agreement with ABBL and ACA.

Last Tuesday, seven months after the start of negotiations, an agreement on the renewal of the collective work agreements in the banking and insurance sectors was reached. The end of the negotiations will lead to an official signature at the end of the day. "The signature will arrive very soon," someone close to the file said on Thursday afternoon.

"The agreement in principle that was discussed in November gave us minimum standards to allow us to reach a signature. The minimums have been completely reached and even exceeded. We have even obtained, without going into details, a bonus for those who work remotely, a linear increase of 0.7% this year and 0.3% next year and an improvement in the number of days off in addition to other improvements that will be detailed soon," said Roberto Mendolia, president of ALEBA.

"We are very happy with this agreement, because we have managed to have a lot of improvements. Especially since they all come from our catalog of demands, including the financial increase for all employees in the sector. A demand that we never abandoned, unlike some other trade union," said Véronique Eischen, member of the OGBL executive board and head of OGBL-SBA, taking aim at trade union ALEBA.

"We are delighted with this agreement, which is in the interest of the employees. Moreover, it includes a large part of our demands. However, the negotiations started very badly with the announcement of an agreement between ALEBA and ABBL last November. Instead of having one set of demands, we ended up with two sets of demands. It was not easy and we turned to the minister of labour. And it was only after the withdrawal of sectoral representation that we could really start to move forward," said Paul de Araujo, LCGB union secretary.

A palpable tension

A comment that shows that tensions are still present between the LCGB, the OGBL and ALEBA. The latter has had its sectoral representation withdrawn by labour minister Dan Kersch (LSAP), against a background of power struggles and egos between the unions.

ALEBA had incurred the wrath of the other two unions by communicating, perhaps awkwardly, about an "agreement in principle" with ABBL and ACA in November, even before negotiations began. The LCGB and OGBL then strongly denounced the method, accusing ALEBA of " acting alone".

Details of the agreement will become public when the document is formalised with the signatures of each stakeholder to recognise it.

This article was originally published in French on Paperjam and has been translated and edited for Delano.