The government and wage earners have been talking past each other for a long time, and on Thursday the same thing happened again in Senatintor.
QThe eskus organizations SAK and STTK organized a demonstration in Senatintor on Thursday in which they opposed the government's labor market and social security reforms.
In the event, the nature of the dispute between the trade union movement and the government became visible. Minister of Labor Arto Satonen (Kok) once again reiterated the government's views on labor market reforms and said he hoped that “the discussion connection will be maintained”. At the same time, the protesters booed, whistled and shouted in between.
Satose had nothing new to say, and clearly did not want to listen to the old message.
On the Friday that followed the noisy day, the consequences of talking in passing were visible in Helsinki: silence prevailed, especially when the public transport services did not work.
It seems that the bad situation will only get worse in the future. The government is not going to back down, and the unions are not giving up on their plans to tighten their grip all the time. The reforms will be turned into laws piece by piece and will soon come into force. This is also hardly the end point of the labor market struggle.
Next, these laws will be tried to be emptied of their content with salary rounds, which will start in the fall in many fields. Ay decision-makers calculate that if working conditions are weakened by drafting laws, the changes will be recovered in subsequent labor market cycles. Contracts would therefore only be signed on terms that offset the effects of the laws.
Ethe government's attempts to change the terms of the local agreement are similiar. In some fields, working conditions are agreed quite freely these days. If something new is written into the law about local bargaining, the representatives of the unions will probably become very difficult locally when trying to agree on the conditions of doing work at workplaces. Just like in strikes, in these actions the wage earners miss the target: the employer.
The passing conversation continues. The government will prove its unwillingness to seek compromises, and the ay movement will prove that the rules of industrial action must be revised.
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