PAM announces overtime ban in the retail sector

The negotiations between Service Union United PAM and the Finnish Commerce Federation, for the employers, on minimum working conditions and pay for retail sector employees have progressed in an atmosphere conducive to a resolution.

“There was already consensus on many matters today and we were able to deflect some of the employers’ most radical proposals. We were also prepared to accept some of the proposals from the employers that they considered very significant”, PAM President Ann Selin says.

When the morning’s meeting was over, however, we concluded that we were not making any headway in the negotiations. There were not enough elements to achieve a negotiation result. The parties jointly concluded that the negotiations had broken down.

“PAM’s Executive Committee stated that it does not want the pay gap to increase. We want a collective agreement that safeguards improving incomes for retail sector employees at least at the same rate as for other wage earners”, Selin says.

The pay offer made by the Finnish Commerce Federation would not have delivered that objective. The parties also had a different conception of the extent to which the planned changes to the collective agreement would affect costs in the sector.

According to Selin, PAM’s Executive Committee hopes that the negotiations can resume.
Several issues have also been raised in the retail negotiations that PAM would have been prepared to leave to be resolved in the workplace by shop stewards, as the employees’ representatives, and employers.

“The employers’ federation rejected these proposals of ours, however. They wanted employers to have the right to impose these matters directly. Then employers would decide by themselves how it would be implemented”, Selin says.

“For years, more local agreement has been the collective message from employers. The reason for that has been that people in the workplace know best how things can be made to work. Now the real reason is beginning to emerge: it’s not so much about negotiating matters locally, rather it’s about employers having the power to decree”, Selin says.

The overtime ban and the ban on accumulating a positive flextime balance will start on Monday 19 February at 06.00. Employees who can use flextime will not accumulate a positive balance by doing working days longer than the normal 7.5 hours.

PAM’s Executive Committee will next meet on Thursday 22 February at 3 p.m. The collective agreement in the retail sector sets out minimum working conditions for around 250,000 workers in the retail sector in shops, retail offices and warehouses.

Further information on the overtime ban is found here in Finnish.