Salary increases at SAP: Works Council and trade union dissatisfied

Employees of the SAP software group will receive an average 2.4 percent pay rise retroactively to the beginning of the year. This was announced by the company's works council and IG Metall. The employee representatives had previously demanded a salary increase of at least five percent. Works Council Chairman Eberhard Schick is correspondingly disappointed: this increase “will not motivate the workforce to fill the gaps created by the departure of many experienced colleagues.” Most recently, 3500 employees left the company in Germany.

IG Metall: “An inadequate result”

The actual salary increases depend on the management's assessment of performance, according to IG Metall. Half of the workforce did not reach the average value, but the works council tried to avoid a zero increase for most employees. For the majority of employees, the employee representatives are expecting an increase of at least 0.72 percent. “From our perspective as a trade union, this is a more than inadequate result for SAP employees,” says Julia Wegner, trade union secretary at IG Metall in Heidelberg.

SAP, on the other hand, points out that the salary increase not only raises the annual target salary, but also increases the contributions to the company pension scheme and employee shares. Considering the employer contributions and the current economic development of the company, employee share ownership would lead to an average increase of 5.3 percent. According to IG Metall, many employees also benefit from the strong business figures through bonus payments. These have risen by between 8 and 16 percent.

Union sees career starters at a disadvantage

IG Metall has also criticized SAP's salary policy towards young professionals. Although they are part of the Early Talents Program for the first two to three years, for which an additional salary budget is available, they do not receive any salary increases if they were not employed by the company on the cut-off date.

If employees no longer count as Early Talents after this period, “the SAP salary system massively disadvantages those who want to become significantly more valuable to the company by gaining professional experience,” says Johannes Reich, representative of the works council list Pro Mitbestimmung of IG Metall. This particularly affects employees in the first ten years of their career. The software company did not comment on this.

In the last financial year, SAP increased its turnover by 10 percent to 34.2 billion euros. However, at 3.15 billion euros, only half of the profit from 2024 remained. The company had spent several billion on severance payments for thousands of employees who left the company voluntarily or took early retirement. The job cuts are part of the strategy to drive forward the artificial intelligence business.

(sfe)