KJust before this year's collective bargaining round for 585,000 employees in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, there is a change in leadership on the employers' side. Katja Scharpwinkel, who has just taken on her new duties as a board member and labor director at BASF, is also to become the new president of the Federal Chemical Employers Association (BAVC). At its board meeting on Friday, she was nominated to succeed the long-time chemical employer president Kai Beckmann. As the association announced after the meeting, the change in leadership is to be carried out at the end of April as part of the BAVC general meeting.
Scharpwinkel's nomination for the top of the association can also be interpreted as a commitment by BASF to social partnership in Germany and to the Ludwigshafen location – despite cost-cutting plans with staff cuts that the company has adopted after a weak financial year in 2023 and which have caused some anger in the Mining Chemicals Energy Union ( IG BCE). Such a commitment to industry-wide social partnership would hardly be compatible with plans for a radical cultural change within the group.
Gained a lot of experience at BASF
Scharpwinkel, who holds a doctorate in chemistry and was born in 1969, is also the site manager for the main Ludwigshafen plant with almost 40,000 employees in her new position at BASF. She comes from Hagen and has been working as a manager in the industry since 1997. She came to BASF in 2009 and was most recently head of the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Even though she has not yet held any positions in the BAVC, she is familiar with association work – especially in the chemical industry association VCI and the Eastern Committee of the German Economy.
The change at the top of the BAVC was caused by an early resignation: the previous president Kai Beckmann, a full-time member of the management board of Merck KGaA, has announced that he will give up his honorary position this year, although he is actually elected until 2025. However, the term “premature” easily gives rise to false ideas: measured by association traditions, the Darmstadt top manager has been president for an unusually long time, namely since 2017, three years longer than usual.
Actually, the question of succession would have arisen at the end of his second two-year term. Since this fell in the middle of the corona pandemic in spring 2021, the need for continuity prevailed in the association; and when Putin's war of aggression and the threat of an energy emergency brought the next shock wave two years later, it was like that again.
Apparently, from the point of view of those involved, now is a good time window to make the change. It shouldn't be too hard of a cut for the industry collective bargaining round with IG BCE either. The president has not yet been responsible for directly leading the employers' negotiations. In addition, it was said that the new top woman wanted to maintain particularly close teamwork with the vice presidents who have been active in the BAVC for a long time.
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