Labor market UPM’s strike threatens at the turn of the year, caretakers’ negotiations are expected to be difficult – this is the start of spring

Tight The spring of the labor market took off in the last meters of the year when the employment contract dispute between Keitele Group and the Confederation of Finnish Industry progressed on Wednesday up to the level of a strike warning.

And Keitele Group is not the only company under strike: since the beginning of the year, Metsäyhtiö UPM has a strike is about to begin, whose parties are the Paper Association, the Trade Union Pro and the Electrical Association, if the negotiations do not proceed.

The Paper Association issued on Wednesday yet their proposals a new collective agreement which, according to the association, corresponds to the collective agreements already approved by other companies in the sector. They already cover about 75 percent of the Paper Association’s members working in the paper industry.

Dead end This is partly due to the transformation of the labor market system, which has led to the abandonment of sectoral collective agreements in many areas. Forest industry after resignation on the sectoral collective agreement, trade unions have negotiated working conditions directly with companies.

According to labor market organizations, the transition will make the labor market round more difficult to predict than before. The more negotiations are decentralized, the more parties are involved in negotiating collective agreements. In this case, the number of possible deadlocks also increases.

On the other hand, dead ends are smaller than before. Where previously the interruption of sectoral negotiations meant problems for the sector as a whole, only a single company may now find itself in a state of non-agreement and industrial action. The situation of Keitele Group is a good example of this.

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The transformation makes the labor market round more difficult to predict than before.

Technology industry will be one of the areas where negotiations are becoming exceptionally interesting. The general collective agreement in the sector expired at the end of November, and a new one has not yet been negotiated. Negotiations have not seemed particularly easy: in december, efforts were made to speed up negotiations including bans on overtime and shift work.

Like the forest industry, too The technology industry has exited general collective agreements. Some companies in the technology sector will therefore negotiate a national collective agreement, while others will negotiate directly with employees and trade unions on a company-by-company basis.

It remains to be seen how the division of the employer field will affect the course of negotiations in the technology industry. If the achievement of a national collective agreement in the sector is significantly delayed, it could also affect other negotiations that would otherwise have compared wage increases to those achieved in the technology industry.

In addition to the technology industry, the chemical industry will be in talks at the beginning of the year, and its collective agreements will expire at the turn of the year.

In February is seen as another difficult place in the labor market spring when the state and municipal collective agreements in the social and health sector come to be negotiated.

If the negotiations in the technology industry last until February, they may also have an indirect effect on the negotiations in the social security sector. Negotiations in the SOTE sector are rubbing against the already long-standing demand from the workers’ side for raising the level of wages in the sector more than in other sectors in order to close the pay gap.

Negotiations will also be hampered by the ongoing coronary virus situation, which has led to a lack of resources in the sector and fatigue among caregivers. For example, in the spring of 2020, in the municipal collective bargaining, the social and health trade union Tehy watched in addition to wage increases, there was also a special “corona surcharge” that would have been paid during the pandemic. At that time, the supplement was not received.

In addition to the social and health sectors, collective agreements will also be negotiated in February in the automotive, transport, energy and food industries, among others.

In turn, the turn of the spring will be an interesting tourism and restaurant industry due to the effects of the corona pandemic.

Facilitate the factor in the spring labor market negotiations will be the ongoing economic growth.

In an upturn, employers have a better chance of responding to wage increases from trade unions and, on the other hand, a greater desire to avoid possible strikes when order books are full.