Fair Working Conditions and Human Rights

Our employees are crucial to our success. In return, we offer them secure and attractive jobs with fair pay, and are increasingly extending this responsibility to cover the entire supply chain.

Our development, our business success and our long-term position in the market depend to a large extent on our employees. With their know-how and passion for logistics, they ensure that we as a company never stand still. And just as each and every one of them makes a contribution to the whole, for us it is a matter of course that all employees are treated with equal respect and nobody is a victim of discrimination.

As another important cornerstone for ensuring fair working conditions across the board, we pay transparent and competitive wages and salaries based on collective bargaining agreements.

In addition to our own employees, we take a holistic view of human rights along the entire supply chain and in particular consider respect for human rights to be an integral aspect of our corporate social responsibility.

Employment contracts, wages and social benefits

For 2022, we extended the reporting of our personnel key performance indicators to include the foreign sites of our fully consolidated companies. At 89.5 percent, the majority of our total global workforce of 10,257 is employed on a permanent basis.

In the reporting year, 89.6 percent of our employees worked full-time. As in previous years, women made up the largest group of part-time employees with 57.0 percent – with Germany clearly accounting for the highest proportion of part-time employees at just over 10 percent.

Employment contract and type

Up to now, we have only categorized our workforce into women and men, but we are aware that not everybody self-identifies with either of these two genders. To date, only a few of our own employees have identified as diverse. As they currently account for a proportion of less than 0.1 percent of the total workforce, we do not yet explicitly include this group in our statistics. We are, however, continuing to monitor this aspect in the interests of equal representation.

Our employees are paid on the basis of the collective agreements applicable in our industry and at the respective locations, or in individual cases at comparable rates. In our foreign companies, we also support regulations under collective law that enable transparent and fair working conditions. Naturally, this means that the statutory minimum wage applies not only to our own employees, but also to temporary agency workers. They have the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. In 2022, the proportion of our employees in Germany integrated into a collective bargaining system stood at 97.7 percent.

We are mindful of our employees’ needs, making it incumbent on us as an employer to provide targeted support with reconciling career and family – for example by offering the opportunity to work part time. We offer our employees additional options through flexitime models as well as remote working. Our central departments hold a permanent certificate from berufundfamilie Service GmbH. The aim of this audit is to implement a sustainable family-conscious human resources (HR) policy.

Job security as a top priority

The coronavirus pandemic placed heavy demands not only on us as a company, but also on our employees. In some cases the impacts were severe, particularly in areas related to the automotive industry. At our largest car terminal in Bremerhaven, for example, supply chain bottlenecks and the resulting lack of materials availability led to a significant drop in revenue and earnings not just in the reporting year. In order to safeguard jobs at the site despite this, an employment protection agreement was concluded in May 2022. The agreement, which was negotiated with the involvement of the local collective bargaining committee and the ver.di trade union and has a term of 24 months, contains comprehensive assurances on job security and the protection of our employees.

Codetermination and one BLG for all

Automation and digitalization will have a lasting impact on a number of industries, including logistics. We want to take advantage of the opportunities that this change presents, while at the same time managing the transformation in a socially acceptable way. In doing so, we must involve our employees and get them on board with us on every step of this journey. In 2020, initial talks began on a possible collective agreement to regulate the consequences of automation and digitalization. Such an agreement had already been concluded within the Group at EUROGATE in 2018, when the automation plans for the container terminals became more concrete. Due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the tariff negotiations were put on hold in the past couple of years. However, continuing exchanges relating to these topics have shown how differently automation and digitalization projects can be implemented in BLG’s business areas. Against this background, the situation is currently being reassessed in dialog with the operating partners to determine a framework in which a regulation under collective bargaining law can provide guidelines for the design of automation and digitalization projects.

True codetermination has a high priority for us. We promote dialog with our employees and attach the greatest importance to respectful collaboration. This builds on mutual trust and strong representation of interests. This dialog is implemented at operational level by the works councils and at Group level by the employee representatives on the Supervisory Board, and the resulting exchanges are both valuable and rewarding for the entire company. Rotational elections to the works councils took place BLG-wide in the reporting year; at the Elsdorf site for the first time, where five colleagues were elected to the new committee. We also practice codetermination on a day-to-day basis on other levels – especially where the focus is on workplace design, the compatibility of career and family or occupational health and safety. One example of this is the new regulations agreed jointly with the General Works Council on flexible working hours at BLG AutoTerminal Deutschland. Among other things, employees can now have overtime bonuses and – above a certain limit – monthly hours paid out from their working time account. A flexitime framework has also been introduced for white-collar workers. In Bremen, 68 of our staff are currently testing the workplace of the future as part of the Work@BLG pilot project. The office, which is divided into three zones, offers ideal conditions for modern working, with meeting rooms optimized for hybrid meetings, a work area based on the desk-sharing principle and a space for creative work and exchanges.

Equal integration for temporary agency workers

In logistics, fluctuations in the order situation are by no means uncommon. This means we regularly have to rely on agency employees as a backup during order peaks or very short-term contracts. Conversely, during the coronavirus pandemic, we had to introduce short-time work at many of our sites. During this time, we made only minimal changes to our workforce. In 2022, as the order situation picked up again, we saw a significant increase in the deployment of temporary workers, which we are now gradually reducing by hiring them on a permanent basis as well as recruiting our own staff. It goes without saying that here we work exclusively with service providers that meet the minimum wage requirements.

As of 31 December 2022, we employed 72.8 percent own staff in Germany, 2.9 percent employees from the Central German Seaport Operators (Gesamthafenbetrieb, GHB) and 19.3 percent employees from other personnel service providers. This corresponded to the aforementioned substantial increase of 5.4 percentage points for temporary agency staff compared to 2021. We make no distinctions between these employee groups with regard to contractually agreed work assignment flexibility. This includes short notice for work assignments, overtime or weekend work. It goes without saying that we adhere at all times to the principle of “equal pay for equal work” in line with the requirements of the German Temporary Employment Act (Arbeitnehmerüberlassungsgesetz – AÜG).

We regularly take employees from agencies and personnel service providers into permanent employment and give them preference when additional positions need to be filled – in the reporting year, 95 temporary staff at the Bremen site became “fully-fledged” members of BLG.

Human rights along the supply chain

We consider respecting universal human rights at all times to be an integral aspect our corporate social responsibility, both with respect to working conditions within our own company and in cooperation with suppliers, subcontractors and business partners. Our internal and external policies and guidelines help us to anchor this principle in our systems and processes along the entire supply chain. Most recently, for example, we updated our Labor Relations Code in the reporting year, which regulates issues such as codetermination, compliance with collective wage agreements and temporary agency employment. Our policy statement on human rights forms part of this. This underscores our rejection of practices such as child and forced labor just as clearly as our action against any form of discrimination and our support for fair wages, social benefits and a limit on working hours, as well as for the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. In order to share this understanding with our employees, we offered a corresponding training course for the first time in 2022. We also expect our upstream and downstream partners in the supply chain to adhere without exception to the corresponding human rights standards and communicate this clearly in our Supplier Code of Conduct. For more information on how we fulfill our due diligence obligations in this context, see the Supply Chain section.

Fluctuation as an important metric

Employee fluctuation provides us with valuable information for measuring our attractiveness as an employer and how satisfied our employees feel in their job. It is also economically relevant, because recruiting and onboarding new colleagues is time- and cost-intensive. We calculate the fluctuation rate from the number of employees leaving of their own accord compared with the average number of employees over the financial year. In 2022, 475 employees left us at their own request. Compared with the previous year, the rate thus again increased quite significantly from 3.9 to 5.0 percent. This increase had been forecast by labor market experts. After an initial substantial decline in the readiness to switch jobs as a result of the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic, we are now witnessing a kind of “catch-up effect” here. The general shortage of skilled labor is supporting this trend as new prospects on the job market are opening up for many people. To help us understand the reasons for switching above and beyond this, we conduct exit interviews as a standard procedure, which give us pointers for measures that could be implemented in the future.