The Chancellor advises the collective bargaining parties to make one-off payments so as not to unnecessarily fuel the general upward trend in prices with their wage policy - and what is IG Metall doing?

A collective agreement with the highest percentage increase in 30 years, 6.5 percent more monthly wages.

There is a one-off payment as a "named energy bonus" on top.

After a series of warning strikes, she managed to do this overnight for around 70,000 workers in the steel industry.

Is that how Olaf Scholz imagined things when he recently called for a “concerted action” by politicians and social partners to fight inflation in the Bundestag?

Their first meeting is yet to come.

But IG Metall creates facts.

And there are more to come before the meeting at Scholz (planned for early July): On Monday, the board of the largest German trade union will set the cornerstones of the new wage demand for 4 million employees in the metal and electrical industry.

If he were to use the steel industry as a blueprint, one would have to ask what should actually be discussed in such a "concerted action".

But you can also rate it a little milder, at least for the time being: Despite all the collective bargaining ambitions and despite a theoretically huge strike force in the steel industry, IG Metall has not yet pulled through with its wage policy to the max.

After all, the 6.5 percent increase in wages is still below the current rate of inflation – which in the course of the collective bargaining round has pushed ever closer to the original requirement of 8.2 percent.

In addition, the 6.5 percent does not only apply for 12 months, but for 18;

calculated on an annual basis, they remain below that.

That's still a long way from the legendary 11 percent collective bargaining agreement of 1974, which has become the symbol of a nagging trend towards stubborn inflation and mass unemployment.

IG Metall shows predictability

Hardly less important for the collective bargaining climate at the moment: Despite the high inflation and some contortions, IG Metall has not yet gone beyond the scope of its traditional bargaining policy arguments, which means that it is signaling to employers a certain amount of predictability in the face of all upheavals.

She justifies the level of the steel collective agreement primarily with the special boom, from which the industry is currently benefiting.

This argument cannot simply be transferred to the metal and electrical industry, whose colorful industrial landscape ranges from iron foundries and machine builders to car suppliers and manufacturers.

In addition, IG Metall chairman Jörg Hofmann undauntedly pretends that wage policy in this large industrial sector – as usual – wants to be based on macroeconomic parameters such as the central bank's target inflation rate and general productivity progress.

With a little imagination, his most recent statements on this subject can even be interpreted in such a way that he promises employers a long contract term in order to spread the burden of a short-term high percentage increase over time.

Prices are rising in many places

This is no guarantee that rational forces will prevail in the upcoming major pay rounds (the public sector will follow soon).

It is up to these forces to be reminded that the majority of employers cannot pass on rising energy, material and commodity prices to customers at will.

And that collective bargaining agreements that are even close to the current inflation rates are many times higher than what is indisputably the most important benchmark for wage development: the progress in productivity.

Scholz and the traffic light coalition should see the self-confident appearance of the big unions as a further reason to focus state transfer payments to cushion the rise in living costs all the more closely on the target group of the needy.

Workers in the middle class and in high-wage industrial sectors, who are currently enforcing historic wage increases, are not the first to have the state provide them with new energy subsidies and climate funds at the expense of the general public.

This should also be a topic of the planned “concerted action”.

And it's still worthwhile even if IG Metall has created further facts by then.