The IG Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt (IG BAU) is a trade union in Germany with a membership of 350,000 (as per end of 2007). It is the fourth largest of eight industrial affiliates of the DGB (German Confederation of Trade Unions). IG BAU is active in the sectors of construction and engineering, building materials, building cleaning, facility management, gardening, forestry and agriculture. Since 2013 Robert Feiger has been the president of IG BAU. IG BAU was formed in 1996 as a merger of the Building and Construction Union (IG BSE) and the Horticulture, Agriculture and Forestry Union (GGLF). On the international level IG BAU is affiliated to the global union federations BWI, IUF and UNI. The national headquarters of IG BAU is in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. IG BAU has also two political lobbying offices in the federal capital city of Berlin and the European capital city of Brussels/Belgium, 13 regional offices in most German federal state capitals and more than 120 local offices in all major cities of Germany. Collective Bargaining Policies Most of the collective agreement policy of IG BAU is centralized. Many of the national collective agreements have been declared generally binding by the German federal government and so apply to all employers and workers in certain sectors like e.g. construction and the building cleaning trades. Because there was no general legal minimum wage in Germany until recently the IG BAU lobbied from 1990 onwards for the introduction of sectoral legal minimum wages based on the lowest categories of sector-wide collective agreements and succeeded in 1996. Since that time IG BAU - together with sectoral national employer organisations - has created legal sectoral minimum wages for general construction , demolition, painting, scaffolding, roofing and building cleaning including hotel cleaning and janitors by collective agreements, which have been declared generally binding by a federal order of the federal labor ministry. These minimum wages also apply to foreign companies who send their workers temporarily to Germany. In 2013, IG BAU secured a wage hike of 3.2 percent for 12 months. In 2016, it negotiated a wage rise with employers for about 785,000 German construction workers. Under the agreement, employees in western German states got a rise of 4.6 percent and in eastern states 5.3 percent over a period of 22 months; the union had originally demanded a wage increase of 5.9 percent for its workers. Similar negotiations in 2018 resulted in