The proposal now covers all five businesses, including the production of printing papers.
Of the year The industrial action at UPM’s mills from the beginning ends.
According to HS, both UPM and the Paper Association have been approved by the mediator Leo to Finland the conciliation proposal issued on Thursday.
Answers had to be given by 4 p.m. The settlement proposal must be either approved or rejected in its entirety.
A strike of about 2,000 Paper Union employees has been going on in 12 UPM units since the beginning of the year.
It has paid UPM hundreds of millions of euros and the Paper Association an estimated twenty million euros in strike grants. In addition, forest owners and many subcontractors have lost revenue and public sector tax revenue.
UPM applied for its own contract for each of its five industries, which it will receive. The contract is for two + two years, ie after two years the salaries are renegotiated, but otherwise the contract remains largely unchanged.
The new agreements are valid for four years from April 22, 2022 to April 21, 2026.
However, the agreements start and end at the same time, so the Paper Association can renegotiate them without approving other agreements until all the agreements have been approved.
It was important for UPM to have more working time in its paper business.
According to HS, working hours will be extended by 30 hours, but paid when UPM applied for significantly more working time without compensation.
The length of the agreement is about 40 pages, compared to about 180 pages in the paper union agreement.
Ending a long strike means starting machines and gradually starting production. The strike has already caused a shortage of labels and printing paper, for example.
Paper union According to the press release, the main goal of the union in the negotiations was to keep the working conditions in the sector consistent in the current model of company-specific agreements.
“With UPM, this goal was the hardest to achieve. The essential result is that the extensive impairments required by the employer, such as the increase in working hours without compensation, ie working hours, did not materialize, ”says the chairman of the Paper Association. Petri Vanhala in the union bulletin.
According to the association, the industrial action did not only affect UPM’s paper alliance members but more broadly the trade union movement: the paper allies defended the right to bargain in an organized strike.
“The effort with UPM was heavy and showed where a company-specific agreement is at its worst,” the association’s press release reads.
Mediator the settlement proposal issued on thursday concerned all five business areas, ie also printing papers, while the previous proposals concerned only four, ie biofuels, pulp, specialty papers and labels.
Mediation on printing papers had previously been suspended because the parties’ positions, despite their convergence, were still quite far apart.
The paper union’s board of directors knocked down the proposals for the four businesses unanimously last week because their coverage was insufficient when only half of the paper union members in the mills were involved.
UPM was disappointed with the Paper Association’s rejection decision. It would have accepted the conciliation proposals.
UPM and the Paper Association have negotiated company-specific collective bargaining agreements for the first time in this round, as the employers’ organization Metsäteollisuus announced that it was already withdrawing from national collective bargaining agreements in the autumn of 2020.
The fact that UPM has demanded business-specific agreements and has not agreed to company-specific agreements, such as the other large forest companies Stora Enso and Metsä Group, has brought complications. These companies have been able to continue their operations without strikes.
Paper Union has since agreed to negotiate business – specific agreements with UPM but is seeking to enter into the agreements at the same time.
UPM has stated that it will strive to meet customer demand from its mills outside Finland during the strike. The company has not released an estimate of the financial impact of the strike.
For example, Inderes estimates that the strike has resulted in a loss of UPM’s adjusted operating profit of a few million euros per day. There are no estimates of longer-term effects or reputational damage.
UPM will publish its interim report for the first half of the year next Tuesday.
Read more: UPM’s strike costs millions a day, and there is no solution to the industrial struggle – What exactly do Pesonen and Wahlroos want?
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