The future collective agreement. Graphic Industry Federation / Finnish Book Workers’ Union
Introduction
The purpose of the study is to promote the continuity of employment and livelihood in the graphic arts industry. The Graphic Industry Federation (GTL) and the Finnish Book Workers’ Union (SKL) wished to examine how the federations could support these objectives.
Twenty-two GTL member companies whose employees were represented by SKL participated in the interview study. In each company a group was formed comprising representatives of both the employee and employer sides. They described how the federations could remove obstacles hindering the company’s operations and support factors promoting them. The topics covered in the interviews included, among other things, employment relationships, working hours, skills, investments, productivity and profitability, local bargaining, and participation systems. The interviews covered problems contained in legislation, collective agreements, and attitudes. The proposals made in the companies concern amendments to collective agreements, influencing the authorities, and other activities of the federations.
The material gathered from the interviews was structured in the study into three consecutive components:
- changes in production arising from the external environment,
- solutions in the use of labour arising from changes in production, and the implementation problems of these solutions, and
- the employment effects of proposals for resolving implementation problems.
The renewal of work stems from changes in production. Each reform in the use of labour was linked to one or more changes in production. The study begins by examining the changes that have taken place in production. For each change, its causes and the resulting solutions in the use of labour are described.
The solutions adopted in the use of labour are examined individually. The study describes what kinds of applications of the solutions had been made in different types of companies and what kinds of problems had been encountered in these applications. The main focus is on the problems. Not all difficulties arose from the collective agreement or labour legislation. Nevertheless, even problems arising from attitudes were seen as having connections to the activities of the federations.
The members of the interview groups linked their proposals for change to problems encountered in their daily work. The measures proposed to the federations were rarely justified on employment grounds, even though all of them have employment effects. For this reason, the proposals are finally examined independently of their justifications, linked to their employment effects. (AI translation)
- ISSN: 1236-7176
- ISBN: 951-9282-83-1
