Negotiations at Kemira: A new education fund to be set up
[24.09.2008]
The parties involved in Kemira's corporate-level mandatory joint consultation group reached an agreement on Monday on the support package to be made available to employees who lose their jobs.
At present, the parties are negotiating at local level about redundancies. These negotiations will still continue for another week.
Details of the support package will not be published, but some central elements of the package are as follows: Redundancy payments are bound to the length of the employment and the pension solutions considerably exceed the mandatory level. In addition, the package includes incentives that make it easier to move to another locality and a separate bonus for those employees who have to work during their period of notice.
In principle, the most significant part of the package is a new education fund. Kemira will make a remarkable investment towards the fund. Its role is to support the employees, who lose their jobs, to find new jobs. This support will be paid on top of the support funded by society. Services of the fund are available only to Kemira's personnel in Finland.
The initiative for establishing the fund was made by the personnel.
- The education fund is historical in every sense. It is to be administrated by a coordination group where the personnel are also represented. The group will make decisions on how support is to be distributed. Thus, the representatives of the personnel are allowed to participate in the decision -making concerning how the money of the employer is to be spent. No lower or upper limits regarding support have been defined, Tomi Juntunen, the shop steward at Kemira's unit in Oulu, says.
- In recent years, in the industrial sector, the parties have agreed on several support packages but none of them have included anything like the education fund, as agreed upon in the negotiations at Kemira. This is a new opening towards enlarging the responsibility of a company that gives notice to its employees, Annemarje Salonen, the head of TU's industrial sector, says.
- During the negotiations, various groups and trade unions have cooperated exceptionally well. It was decisive in reaching a satisfying support package, Taru Kallio, representative of the YTN, says.
As the agreement on the support package has been reached the Europe-level strikes, planned by Kemira's personnel, have now been cancelled. There were plans to organise this week action in seven EU Member States.
*Press release by the Chemical Workers' Union,
the Union of Salaried
Employees (TU) and the Federation of Professional and Managerial Staff
(YTN), published on Monday 22 September
Viimeksi muokattu: 24.09.2008
[Kerro kaverille]
