Apart from business as usual, 2026 will be a dynamic year in many areas in terms of implementation of process changes. It feels like “changing the engine while the plane is flying’. A brief overview of what awaits us this year.
New collective agreement (CLA)
In the middle of last year, the market concluded a new collective agreement. Our branch organisation NBBU put a lot of time, work and effort into this. The content of this CLA is about rewarding our employees equally compared to the conditions of our clients. After the agreement on the CLA, all preparations started. NBBU put a lot of time into information sessions and helped its members with a lot of material to be as prepared as possible. Still, there are always company-specific components when implementing such a big change that make you partly reinvent the wheel yourself. Here again, there is the possibility of switching with the NBBU helpdesk whether the application made is the right one.
Implementation
From the moment your own organisation has a clear idea of what needs to be done, you can find out, in conversation with the client, what consequences this new collective labour agreement will have. In the summer, we did a “tour” of clients to inform them with the information available at that time. From November, there was a lot of communication about the call-out leading to the provable equivalent pay for our employees. Yet you see that, despite all the preparations, clients also have their own processes and tasks to complete. As a result, on many files, we are currently still discussing the application of equivalence from the new collective agreement. We aim to be able to inform our colleagues individually at the end of this month what the new CLA means for them personally.
Changing the engine while the plane is flying
Closing the business, taking care of the changes and then reopening is not an option within our type of service. As a result, we have been in a kind of multi-focus for some time. We are not complaining about this, but are looking forward to when it is completed. Last year was more quiet, this year we are off to a good start which makes the challenge of both serving our relationships and keeping the focus on implementation challenging.
Interested?
A lot of information has already been provided about the new collective agreement. Would you still like to know more about this and especially the application? Then visit website: www.wijzerbelonen.nl. Here you can find all information on the application of the new collective agreement.
We currently have many capacity issues, almost all of which can be found on our website. If you are an engineer active in pharma in the field of project, process Engineering or Validation? Feel free to visit our website and respond.



