New collective agreement in the facility services sector guarantees the right to weekends off
Photo: Susanna Kekkonen.
A new collective agreement was approved for the facility services sector on Monday. The agreement includes pay rises and also improves the position of part-time workers and guarantees employees in the sector the right to weekends off.
The commitment of employees in the facility services sector meant that the collective agreement for the sector could genuinely be negotiated on its terms. That commitment produced the threat of strike action, which resulted in a collective agreement for the sector which does not contain for example any significant changes to working time systems or weekly rest days.
An overall pay increase of 3.3 per cent was negotiated for the facility services sector. Significantly, the pay rise is front-loaded, meaning that the bigger increase comes first. Wages in the sector will increase by 2.0% from 1 April 2020. A further 1.3 % pay rise takes effect from 1 April 2021.
The new agreement completely does away with the extended working hours of the Sipilä government’s competitiveness pact. The pact will be completely removed from the facility services sector with a 10-month transition period. A similar transition period will also apply in the retail sector for example. The negotiations on the pact were not easy, but succeeded without the threatened impairments to the sector.
The facility services sector is partly moved to 24/7 working time. As part of the reconciliation of work and leisure time it is significant that the agreement for the facility services sector also defines the number of Saturday-Sunday weekends off. At least 12 combinations of Sunday and Saturday days per calendar year off were agreed for the sector. For example, in the retail sector there are currently only 9 agreed weekends off.
The definition of body waste bonus agreed in the sector in 2018 was now entered as a separate section in the collective agreement. Functioning arrangements were made locally in several companies for payment of a body waste bonus in the previous agreement period, and now the idea is to introduce these more widely. PAM offers shop stewards high-quality training for reaching local agreement at the workplace.
A summary of all the changes in the agreement for the sector can be found in this wiki card (in Finnish). You can also find the new pay scales for the sector here. The wiki card will be published in English next week.