Tekijä (09.10.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) Riku Aalto, president of the Industrial Union, says that the anti-worker policy of the Finnish Government is creating extra pressures for collective bargaining this autumn. The goal of the union is to improve its members' purchasing power.
The collective bargaining for the technology industry began on 12 September. The existing collective agreement will expire at the end of November.
This time the negotiations will be different. The Orpo-Purra right-wing Government has amended several laws in a way which serves to act against the interests of wage and salary earners. And there’s more to come.
- We will try to prevent the effects of legislative amendments to the terms of work, but collective bargaining can not take a stance on everything, Aalto says.
One of the government decisions was to cut earnings-related unemployment benefits. For example, according to the new rules, it will be reduced by 20 per cent after two months.
The government plans to weaken transition security, too. The latter had been designed to improve the position of redundant workers and support their re-employment.
The Industrial Union will try to overcome any watering down of transition security through the collective agreements. This could mean, for instance, making the terms of notice longer in the case of lay-offs.
- However, the collective agreements are not similar, so the goals in various sectors are not identical, Aalto says.
There are 35 bargaining sectors in the union. The technology industry is the first one to be negotiated. The union has tens of other nationwide collective agreements to negotiate, too. At the end of this year, some 80 company-specific collective agreements in the mechanical forestry industry will come to an end.
Looking at the bigger picture, collective bargaining is essential to a society based on negotiations and contracts.
- Collective agreements help uphold a controlled environment, in order to make the labour market, pay, overheads and industrial peace predictable, Aalto says.