The new collective agreement is valid from the beginning of next January to the end of April 2024.
Forestry company Stora Enso announces that it has entered into a company-specific collective agreement with Paperiliitto.
The new collective agreement is valid from the beginning of January next year until the end of April 2024.
According to Stora Enso, the agreement includes, among other things, changes to more flexible use and mobility of fixed-term and in-house labor, as well as enabling the use of external labor in some production tasks.
“A company-specific collective agreement can better meet the challenges of different businesses by taking into account the specific characteristics of different industries and units,” says Stora Enso’s Country Manager, CFO Finland Seppo Parvi says in a press release.
President of the Paper Association Petri Vanhala in the press release, thank Stora Enso’s negotiators for their “professional attitude and good spirit during the negotiations”.
“It is important that the company recognizes the trade union movement and its contract law,” Vanhala says.
Paper union in September, chairman Vanhala told HS that the majority of members were in negotiations. According to Vanhala, the forest industry company UPM was “its own chapter” at the time.
Read more: Working conditions in the forest sector are exacerbated by differences of opinion between UPM and the Paper Association – “For us, that limit goes here”
UPM has announced that it intends to agree on terms and conditions of employment with the Paper Association in the coming years by business area.
UPM has six business areas, five of which the Paper Association is the company’s contractual partner. According to UPM, its different businesses differ so much in their logic and product range that negotiations need to be differentiated.
The Paper Association, in turn, has required one agreement throughout the company.
“For us, that limit goes here. The aim is to treat all companies in the same way, even if we are at 50 tables, ”Vanhala said in September.
Stora Enso says that negotiations have also continued with other unions. The company’s goal is to reach a negotiated solution with all unions in good time before the end of the contract period, ie mainly at the beginning of 2022.
The Finnish Forest Industries Association said in October last year that it no longer intends to negotiate general collective agreements for the entire sector after the current agreements expire.
Read more: The forest industry withdraws from general collective agreements and intends to agree on working conditions only between companies and employees
Instead, the premise is that each company negotiates contracts itself. This means that the Forest Industry, which represents companies, is no longer a party to collective agreements.
Stora Enson and the wage increases agreed by the Paper Association are about 1.9 per cent in the first two years and about 0.9 per cent in the third year. The first general increase of 17 cents and a local batch of 18 cents will be implemented on February 28, 2022.
The second increase with the same content will come on March 27, 2023. In the last contract year, January 2024, the general increase and the local lot will both be nine cents.
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