Finnish incomes policy negotiations adjourned until Tuesday

Negotiations for a comprehensive incomes policy agreement in Finland made little or no progress over the weekend. Faced with this impasse, the negotiators decided to adjourn the process on Sunday afternoon with a view to restarting on Tuesday.

Continued negotiations were blocked because the largest employer organisation, the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers - TT, reached the limits of its negotiating mandate. At its meeting last Thursday the Executive Board of TT drew up a list of non-negotiable topics. These include improved job security for employees and shorter working hours.

The only practical consensus achieved over the weekend was that the State should allocate additional resources to vocational adult education in 2003. This means that some major issues remain completely undecided, including employee job security in cases of enterprise downsizing and restructuring, adjustments to hours of work and improvements in the status of workers' representatives. Although the negotiators discussed ways of preventing profiteering at the expense of migrant workers by improving supervision of employment terms, even at this point no settlement was achieved.

As no progress was made in efforts to improve the quality of working life, it was not possible to continue the wage bargaining that traditionally marks the closing stages of the negotiating process. The employee confederations did submit a common proposal to the employers as to how employers and employees could agree on the rules governing profit sharing schemes, but the employers were unwilling to begin negotiations in this area.

The Executive Boards of the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions - SAK and the other employee confederations STTK and Akava will meet on Monday 11 November to discuss the negotiating situation.

The timetable for the current round of incomes policy negotiations is now extremely tight. The Finnish government has set a deadline in early December for submitting any associated legislative proposals to Parliament, and the trade unions must be given enough time to adapt the incomes policy settlement to their own sectoral collective agreements so that the settlement can be ratified by the end of November.

For further details of SAK's objectives for improving the quality of working life see the news bulletin of 7 November 2002. SAK's wage claims for the current negotiating round were reported on 7 October 2002.