German Court Rules: Unions Have No Right to Company Email Lists — But Digital Organising Battle Is Just Getting Started

When management at Thermo Fisher in Bremen banned a planned meeting between the works council and local politicians on company grounds in mid-June, the dispute was about more than access to a site. Behind the ban lies a plan to shift mass-spectrometer production to the Czech Republic — a move that threatens roughly 100 jobs at the Bremen plant. The conflict is a stark reminder of why unions need communication channels their employer cannot control.

Yet a landmark ruling from Germany’s Federal Labour Court (BAG, case reference 1 AZR 33/24) has just drawn a clear line: companies must tolerate union advertising and information by email, but they are not obliged to help. There is no legal right to demand corporate email addresses, no requirement to integrate unions into internal communication networks, and no duty to place links to union websites on the intranet. The practical consequence, the court held, is that unions must build their own digital infrastructure — closed member portals, independent voting tools, and separate mailing systems — if they want to reach employees without relying on the employer’s goodwill.

That judgment lands at a moment when independent communication has never been more urgent. In the bitter pay dispute at Lufthansa subsidiary Cityline, the unions UFO and VC called a strike that escalated rapidly. By mid-April the company had shut down flight operations entirely and furloughed the entire workforce of roughly 2,200. Within two weeks, the parent group announced it would replace those capacities through the newly created City Airlines, which operates under different conditions.

Pressure is mounting in other sectors too. Verdi launched a strike ballot in June that could lead to indefinite walkouts at Postbank, while tens of thousands of retail workers in Bremen and Lower Saxony were called out for warning strikes demanding a 7 percent wage increase.

The trouble is that many workers — especially those without a fixed desk — are hard to reach digitally even when employers want to communicate. A YouGov survey from March among more than 500 so-called frontline workers in Germany found that 60 percent do not have a company-issued mobile staff app. At the same time, the survey revealed a sharp age divide in technology acceptance: 64 percent of 18- to 44-year-olds reported positive experiences with artificial intelligence in the workplace, compared with only 36 percent of those aged 45 to 70.

The media union VRFF responded to these shifts at its biennial conference in Rösrath in mid-June. Delegates set fresh strategic priorities centred on how to handle AI in the industry and how to recruit younger members — both issues that depend heavily on digital reach.

In practice, unions also face outright obstruction. In June, a works council election at a hotel in the Stubaital valley was abandoned prematurely after management allegedly interfered heavily with the voting process. Reports say one candidate was fired and police were called in against the election board.

Taken together, the legal ruling and the real-world clashes underscore a central point: as battle lines harden over pay, restructuring, and digitalisation, unions need secure, employer-independent ways to inform and mobilise their members. The court has told them to build those channels themselves — and the clock is ticking.

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