Pam Magazine: Scoring as the Basis of Wage
Terttu Lämsä and Esa Nieminen urge property services employees to demand that their work be scored. They should also pay close attention to their payslips to confirm that this April's wage increases are paid.
Cleaners and caretakers do not tend to check their wages. Neither do they require their employers to evaluate the difficulty of their work through scoring systems, unless fundamental changes are made in their tasks. At least this is how cleaner-caretaker Terttu Lämsä and janitor Esa Nieminen see things. Lämsä runs section 503 of Finnish Caretakers' Union in Tampere, which has over 2,000 members, and Nieminen acts as the section's deputy chair and chief shop steward.
Payslips are currently a hot topic. From April, wages will increase by 20 euros a month, or 12 cents an hour. In addition, there will be an increase of two percent due to an earnings development programme aimed at increasing earnings levels in this field.
"It is easier to fix mistakes when you take action within a reasonable time", Nieminen states.
During previous years, the increase set in the earnings development programme had come in January, but this year it comes only in April. At times, it has been difficult for the unions to agree on a common programme. For this reason, Lämsä and Nieminen value the fact that there is now a firm agreement on the remaining increases. The programme will lead to an additional 2.5 percent increase in 1 May 2015 and 1 April 2016 and an increase of 1.25 percent in 1 April 2017.
Retail staff can verify wages from a wage table, but in the property services field, the cleaner and the caretaker must - or should, at least - have their work scored before they can identify the correct row for their wage on the wage tables.
In scoring, companies classify work according to four factors: expertise, responsibilities, communication and working conditions. PAM's regional office in Tampere has discovered that small businesses in the Pirkanmaa region have been particularly lax in their work-scoring. According to Lämsä, although individual employees may find a complicated wage system difficult to handle, the goal of fair pay is a worthy one.
"For a cleaner, washing a sauna or stairway is harder than cleaning an office", Lämsä says.
The property services sector adopted this wage system from the metalwork industry in 2000–2002 and it was adjusted in 2010. A steward must be present during scoring. The union trains its shop stewards for this task.
Text:: Tuomas Lehto