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Helsinki (10.09.2014 – Heikki Jokinen) Finland’s national flag carrier Finnair has signed an agreement with the Norwegian crew management company OSM Aviation on outsourcing its cabin services.

The company will provide cabin services for wholly state owned Finnair’s routes to Hong Kong and Singapore - on the first phase, says the Finnair press release.

Finnair is planning to outsource cabin crews on 20 routes in the near future. OSM Aviation is going to recruit all new personnel from Hong Kong and Singapore. Salaries will be paid according to levels in these countries.

This means heavy cuts among the 540 Finnair cabin crew personnel as none of the new staff will be Finns. The first wave of outsourcing will mark the end of roughly a 100 years of work clocked up by the Finnair crew.

The way redundancies are being conducted is quite unique. The existing collective agreement stipulates that redundancies should begin with those employees who have served the shortest time in the company. But Finnair will get rid of staff who have been with the company for a long time, as they usually have better salaries.

So Finnair will target temporary lay-offs for the older employees only. The existing collective agreement allows for this. The Finnish Cabin Crew union could not imagine that there would be redundancies and temporary lay-offs at the same time.

”We did not realise that one could act like this”, says chair of the Cabin Crew Union Thelma Åkers to the press.

OSM is a major player in the outsourced work. It is mainly working on the sea, having 10,500 rental employees. It is now beginning to work on aviation with some 300 rental employees so far. OSM is going to establish a permanent office in Helsinki. It will serve Finnair in future outsourcings also.

The trade unions have roundly condemned Finnair’s action. Matti Huutola, the vice chair of trade union confederation SAK said that Finnair is the shame of the state. ”Finnair is trampling on the rights of its workers and the state is following silently on the sidelines.” The company is replacing Finnish cabin crew with a cheap foreign labour, he said.

Antti Rinne, Minister of Finance and former trade union leader has criticised Finnair for its actions. ”I do not accept gimmicks with terms of employment. And this is just that.”

All the transport trade unions issued a joint statement on Finnair plans. They do not accept these and will have a joint meeting next week. They are pondering how to stop this unhealthy development.

”This is a major issue”, says Marko Piirainen, chair of the Transport Union AKT. ”We cannot just look aside when competent domestic labour is to be replaced with cheap foreign labour. Especially when we know that the cabin crew has already agreed to millions of euros in cost savings.”

Finnair and the Finnish Air Line Pilots' Association SLL have just signed a new collective agreement with some cost savings effect.

The European Transport Workers Federation ETF has been in contact with the Prime Minister of Finland saying it is ready to campaign against the outsourcing.