The price of constant tendering
The head shop steward Lea Ikonen at ISS-Palvelut is aware of the fact, that negotiations followed by cooperation procedure due to competitive tendering are unpleasant both for the employer and the employees. Photo: Anna Autio
PAM wants to reduce the out-of-control price war in the industry and improve the position of hourly-paid employees.
“What should I do when there’s no way I can clean my target within the assigned time?” This is a frequently asked question at PAM’s member advice service.
When the allocated time is not enough to complete the work, it is rarely a question of the employee being slow. Instead, the relation of the time scheduled and the amount of work required has been incorrectly calculated.
“If an employee in this situation is doing their best and not neglecting their duties, they should tell the employer that there just wasn’t enough time to finish the designated area within the set time. We also recommend that employees contact the chief shop steward (luottamusmies in Finnish) and ask the employer how the allocated time was calculated,” says Jarkko Viitanen, collective bargaining specialist at PAM.
Addressing the expected pace of work is important. The collective agreement for the facilities services sector dictates that the employer must present the basis for the system of allocating time for work duties. This means that it must be possible to examine the actual time spent cleaning each site.
Viitanen has been monitoring developments in the facilities services sector for several years. He knows that companies in the sector typically do not consider the fact that the cleaning and maintenance of different types of sites requires different amounts of time. Instead, cleaning work in particular is often sold by the square metre or a similar flat rate.
“When companies keep selling the service at ever cheaper rates, they have to recoup the costs somehow. And usually they take from the salaries and time of the workers who are already being paid very little,” he says.
For workers, tendering processes are a risk to their jobs and livelihoods. Even when workers could keep their jobs after the tendering, it often resulted in a tighter pace of work, with the same amount of work being required in a shorter time.
Towards fairer competition and a 24/7 society
According to Viitanen, competing on price when the work has already been pushed to maximum efficiency could be reduced by changing certain sections of the collective agreement. A central issue is how the demands level of the work is evaluated, or how demanding facilities services companies consider the work to be.
“If all companies evaluated the same work as equally demanding at all companies, it would reduce unhealthy competition that can even veer into the grey economy. This evaluation should be based on the actual work, and it should be re-examined annually,” Viitanen explains.
"The evaluation should be based on the actual work, and it should be re-examined annually"
The collective agreement should also be improved so that it would take people who work on different days of the week and at different times equally into account.
Viitanen believes the most urgent changes relate to the equitable division of weekday public holiday bonuses for hourly paid employees, as well as to the way the annual leave is calculated. The latter would also benefit the employer, as it would simplify the payroll process.
The statutes of the collective agreement were originally drafted from the perspective of staff who work during office hours, ignoring the terms of employment of those with atypical hours.
“Many of the sections of the current collective agreement are only really appropriate for employees who work Monday to Friday during office hours. However, we’re increasingly becoming a round-the-clock society, which should be better considered in the wording of the collective agreement,” Viitanen clarifies.
He believes the most urgent changes relate to the equitable division of weekday public holiday bonuses for hourly paid employees, as well as to the way the annual leave is calculated. The latter would also benefit the employer, as it would simplify the payroll process.
Collective bargaining is now underway in the facilities services sector.
The PAM member survey from 2015 suggests that at workplaces where a tendering process was conducted within two years of the survey, 41% of workers were afraid of falling unemployed. If more than two years had passed after the tendering process, 23% feared for their jobs.