Finnish paper, pulp and paperboard factories were shut down as a strike called by the Finnish Paperworker’s Union began on April 11th 2000. The strike affects about 30.000 employees in the Finnish paper industry. The strike will cost an estimated FIM 200 million ($32,3 million) a day in lost export revenues.
The stoppage started after efforts aimed at reaching a settlement in the labour dispute failed. The views of the two sides were so far apart that the national incomes conciliator decided not to submit a mediation proposal in talks concluded in the early hours of Tuesday. The key issues in the dispute are wages, working hours, the use of subcontracted labour, protection against layoffs and profit-related pay.
Both sides of the strike have presented widely divergent estimates of the costs involved in the worker’s demands. The industry calculates that the union’s demands would raise the wage costs by about 14 per cent by the end of the year 2000. Since the demands were, according to the Finnish Forest Industries’ Association, two or three times higher than those being paid in the competitor countries such as in Germany, they poorly suit to the competitive environment to which Finland is committed as a euro club member. On Tuesday’s press conference Association’s chairman, Juha Rantanen, asked why workers who already have the highest wages among the industry employees should be getting greater increases than the others while productivity and profitability are not exceptionally high. The industry must prepare for a long strike if the Union is not ready to scale down its demands, said Rantanen.
More than half of the Finnish companies’ global output comes from mills abroad unaffected by the strike. However, the managing director of the employers’ association, Timo Poranen, claimed that since the industry is working at near full capacity in other countries, it can be very difficult for the companies to transfer their orders abroad. Furthermore, Swedish paper workers have threatened to support the Finnish the strike action by refusing to fill orders moved to Finnish-owned mills in Sweden.
The production capacity of the Finnish forest industry is 14.4 million tons of paper and board per year in Finland and a further 20 million tons abroad.
For further information, please contact Pekka Lehtinen.
This article contains general information on the subject matter and shall not be relied upon for a specific case. Specialist advice should be sought with respect to any specific circumstances.
