Employee representatives seek level playing field for local bargaining

Wages are increasingly negotiated at workplace level in Finland nowadays. Accords have been reached on the grounds for wage payment, bonuses, sharing of local pay elements and other wage benefits at more than half of all private sector workplaces.

Working hours nevertheless remain the most popular topic of detailed local bargaining in Finland, usually with a view to introducing flexitime arrangements. Flexible working hours have been locally agreed at 60 per cent of private sector workplaces and nearly 80 per cent of workplaces in central government service.

These facts were revealed in a study conducted by the University of Turku based on extensive interview and survey materials collected in 2006 and 2007. The findings of this study have recently been summarised in an English language publication, Local bargaining: a matter of necessity and trust.

Local bargaining is generally based on the national collective agreement for each industry. These agreements increasingly allow for local bargaining within individual enterprises, public authorities and government agencies.

Representatives of the national labour and employer confederations were also involved in the steering group for the University of Turku study. These representatives included research specialist Jyrki Helin from the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions - SAK, Finland&#;8217s largest employee confederation. Helin explains that while SAK is by no means opposed to local bargaining, the organisation views this as an integral part of a three-tier collective bargaining system comprising national labour and employer confederations, trade unions and their employer organisation counterparts, and bargaining at local level. Bargaining nonetheless always requires the negotiators to meet on a level playing field, and to be equally well informed about the subjects of negotiation.

- Our own studies indicate that the shop stewards who represent employees in local bargaining became slightly less well informed about the various topics covered in local bargaining during the early years of the current decade. No more than 40 per cent of shop stewards in SAK-affiliated trade unions felt that they had enough information concerning the subjects of negotiation, Jyrki Helin reports.

While just over half of the employee representatives who contributed their views to the University of Turku study felt that they were sufficiently well informed when engaging in local bargaining, only about one third believed that the negotiating partners were meeting on an adequately equal footing. By contrast, about 80 per cent of employer representatives considered that local bargaining was arranged on a level playing field.

Local bargaining: a matter of necessity and trust has been published in English, Finnish and Swedish. There are links to PDF versions of these publications in the column to the right.