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Trade Union News from Finland
Tekijä (15.05.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The planned changes in the local bargaining legislation will distort competition. In the worst case scenario, pay might drop by even tens of thousands of euros a year.
Foreign employers active in Finland could take advantage of the new legislation. In these companies, employees are usually not organised in the Industrial Union, and there might be high turnovers in staff also. Among such employees, knowledge of the Finnish legislation and collective agreements is probably pretty limited, too.
Tekijä (15.05.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) Finland’s right-wing government plans to change local bargaining by sidelining shop stewards and make it possible, in some cases, to cut pay.
Local bargaining encompasses company level agreements regarding terms of work. The collective agreements list several areas, where it is possible to agree on something differently than that written into the sector collective agreement. These can be issues like organising work shifts, fixing holidays, and deciding on measures that have some influence on pay.
This kind of flexibility is welcomed by both companies and employees. In the technology sector, local bargaining has been part of the union collective agreements since 1994.
Tekijä (17.04.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) In smaller enterprises, employment security is on the wane. The Orpo-Purra Government is abolishing the obligations set out in the act on Co-operation within Undertakings for companies with less than 50 employees. This means that a greater number of employees will end up without the built-in security guaranteed under this law.
One of the expressed goals of the right-wing Government is to improve the prerequisites for the operation of small and medium-size undertakings. Paradoxically, the new legislation might have the opposite impact.
Jenniveera Tabell, a lawyer for the Industrial Union, says in an interview for this magazine (in Finnish, see page 8), that the situation of smaller companies will not improve for the better due to the new legislation. On the contrary, in some cases it might even turn out worse if employees looking for better employment security opt to work for bigger companies.
Tekijä (17.04.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The act on Co-operation within Undertakings stipulates the employer must give relevant information to employees. It regulates obligatory cooperation negotiations with employees in any situation where their position or work will undergo changes, like redundancies.
The law states when the employer must begin negotiations, how to proceed and for how long the negotiations must take.
The employer must follow the law carefully and employees shall be heard. If this does not happen, the law includes sanctions for employers. Without obligatory negotiations, the employer can quite freely present motivations for changes and redundancies as employees do not have the relevant information concerning the company’s true financial situation.
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