First industry level deals in Finland

Unions in the engineering and construction sectors have agreed a 3.1% pay rise for the period from 15 January to the end of January next year. These are the first agreements reached after the ending of a four-year period when pay was set at national level. The main union confederation SAK announced last September that it would not be possible to reach a national level agreement because of the opposition of some powerful individual unions.

The 3.1% increase, reached first for the 110,000 manual workers in engineering on 16 January and followed within hours by a settlement covering 90,000 construction workers, compares with an inflation rate of 1.9% (November 1999). Taken together with a tax reduction adding around 1% to take home pay, which the government announced early to ease the negotiations, it means that real net pay will rise by around 2.0%.

The chair of the metal workers union, Per-Erik Lundh, has expressed the hope that other groups will see this increase as a model to follow. The 25,000 graduate employees in the engineering industry have already followed suit, agreeing a 3.1% increase, but negotiations with the powerful paperworkers union, which was keenest to end the national level agreement, are still going on.