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10 April, 2011
A two-week strike against Finnish papermaker UPM by 1,000 members of ICEM affiliate Ammattilitto Pro is continuing. Production is seriously crimped at six pulp and paper mills of Finland’s largest pulp and paper firm, with work stoppages at 20 other facilities including UPM’s administrative centre in Tempere and its export facility at the Kotka port.
The strike began 6 April and will run until 20 April. Ammattiliitto Pro, representing 4,000 white-collar salaried, technical, and clerical workers across the Finnish pulp and paper sector, targeted UPM because of the Finnish Forest Industries Federation’s (FFIF) unwillingness to offer a national salary structure during a March reopening of a two-year labour agreement.
UPM's Rauma, Finland, Mill
The ICEM issued a Solidarity Alert to global trade unions of the sector on 6 April, and union activists are encouraged here to heed that call by sending messages of support to Ammattiliitto Pro.
The industrial action came after a government conciliator failed to put forward a compromise on 4 April. Despite promises in early rounds of talks that a national pay scheme would be submitted and structured around work skills and work requirements in a sector dramatically downsized, the FFIF put forward nothing in federal level talks.
Instead, it deferred all bargaining over pay to the individual mills, or within local workplaces. Pro is seeking some level of equity for lower-paid staff, many of whom are women and deserve some semblance of pay equity.
“We want a system that recognises the increased work and greater responsibility taken on by our members,” said Pro’s chief negotiator for the Pulp and Paper Sector, Jukka Hämäläinen. Some 1,000 clerical and salaried staff in Finland’s pulp and paper industry have been furloughed over the past few years because of an economic downturn that only now is recovering.
On 17 March, the union sent notice of termination of the agreement, effective 1 April. It issued its intent to strike on 23 March and following the complete failure of mandatory government intervention on 1 April and again on 4 April, the strike began 6 April.