More than 100,000 senior salaried employees joined the Competitiveness Pact
The Board of the Federation of Professional and Managerial Staff YTN has approved negotiating results concerning 23 collective agreements that fall under the scope of the Competitiveness Pact.
The most important of these is the collective agreement for the senior salaried employees of the technology sector, which is the second biggest collective agreement of the industrial sector. Other YTN agreements approved during this round included the IT services industry, the engineering industry, the chemicals industry and the energy industry. Regarding the financial sector, the situation is still open.
At this point, the settlement does not apply to the ICT sector, in which the negotiations never even started in earnest, given that PALTA refused to negotiate the parts of the previous employment and growth (TYKA) agreement that remained unresolved.
YTN does not have a collective agreement nor, therefore, a competitiveness pact in the commercial sector, the forest industry, the construction industry and the food industry, since the employers did not want to negotiate one. The increase in working hours does not apply to the professional and managerial staff of these industries.
– This has been an exceptional round in many senses. The employees were willing to open up their own agreements for negotiation in the middle of everything, and implement an internal devaluation. When you account for the increases made in earlier agreements, which were already lower than those in countries that represent our key competition, it would be wise to stop whining about this pact not supposedly improving our competitiveness. It does just that, provided that it will materialise in the end, says YTN’s chairman Heikki Kauppi.