Finnish incomes policy negotiations begin again

Incomes policy negotiations began again in Finland on Tuesday following a two-day pause. The process was broken off last Sunday when hardly any progress had been made over the weekend.

The Executive Boards of Finland's three employee confederations SAK, STTK and Akava reviewed the negotiating situation at meetings held on Monday. All of the organisations affirmed their willingness to resume negotiations, but appealed to the employers to respond to their calls for discussions on important qualitative issues in working life. The employee confederations are particularly keen to improve job security when redundancies are considered, to reinforce the status of workers' representatives, to agree on the principles governing profit sharing schemes and to examine aspects of working hours.

The negotiating mood has become more constructive following the break. Discussions on Wednesday reached a common understanding on the issue of workers' representatives and on measures to supervise the employment terms of foreign workers in Finland with a view to preventing losses of employee rights and profiteering through low wage levels. Considerable differences remain between the parties, however, in the area of job security against the threat of redundancies.

The agenda for the late negotiating session on Wednesday evening also included the size of wage rises. No common understanding was reached on this issue, either, and the incomes policy negotiations continued on Thursday morning. All three employee confederations have scheduled meetings of their Executive Boards to discuss the state of play on Friday morning.

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.