On Thursday 21 January, hundreds of ship builders dropped their tools to protest layoffs and outsourcing at STX Finland's shipyard in Turku. The strike came after STX Finland OY, part of the international STX Europe Group (16,000 employees), confirmed to shed 370 jobs at the Turku yard and outsource some operations. "The workers cannot understand the layoffs and company outsourcing policy," union spokesman Ari Rajamaki said, "Some operations have been given to an outside company at the same time as STX Finland is reducing its own staff." The announcement came only weeks after the yard completed the construction of the world's biggest cruise liner, the Oasis of the Seas. The Euro 1 billion ship had provided jobs at the yard for more than two and a half years.
English: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9DC5IEO0.htm
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The three unions organising municipal employees, UNISON, Unite and GMB, have reacted angrily to the proposal by local government employers to freeze the pay of their 1.6 million employees. The unions had submitted a claim for a 2.5% increase, with a minimum increase of UKP 500 (Euro 577) and are particularly annoyed by the employers' failure even to negotiate before announcing their plans for a pay freeze. UNISON Head of Local Government, Heather Wakefield, said: "Our members are already covering posts left vacant by wide-spread redundancies. 75% of the workforce are women so this is an outright attack on women's pay."
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335 http://www.unison.org.uk/asppresspack/pressrelease_view.asp?id=1701
Public service trade unions in the Frente Comum have called a national demonstration on 5 February in defence of the pay and conditions of public sector employees. The unions are opposed to a range of government measures that they say will end up making public sector workers pay for the crisis.
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335; Portuguese: http://www.stal.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=455&Itemid=1
The DGB union confederation and the ver.di services union have joined in responding to claims that civil servants are a privileged group of workers. They point out that civil servants in the Berlin region, for example, are effectively paid no more than they were in 2003 as a result of cuts to Christmas and holiday payments. Far from being privileged, according to the DGB and ver.di, civil servants such as teachers have to move to stay in work while the emergency services are on-call at all hours of the day. Civil servants also have no right to strike. The key issue for confederation and union is that in the lead up to pay negotiations for federal and local government workers, there needs to be solidarity between civil servants and public employees and they should not be played off against each other.
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335;
German: http://www.verdi.de/nachrichten/newsArchive?channel=nachrichten&id .
Civil service union plans strike for 10 February
January 21, 2010s
The ADEDY civil service federation has called a national strike on 10 February in protest at government plans to cut public spending and freeze pay for many public sector workers (See also this Collective Bargaining Newsletter Year 2 December 2009).
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE60B1FS20100112?type=marketsNews
Greek: http://www.adedy.gr/adedy/site/home/ws/primary+menu/deltia/2010/ ...
The FP-CGIL, UILPA, RDB and FLP union organisations are co-ordinating strike action over working conditions in the justice department on 5 February. They are protesting at the government's failure to allocate proper funding to the justice system in the current budget. The unions argue that, as a result of government cuts, some courts are facing closure and employees are seeing their working conditions deteriorate, with a failure to recruit and train adequate numbers of staff.
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335
Italian: http://www.fpcgil.it/flex/cm/pages/ServeBLOB.php/L/IT/IDPagina/12710
Negotiations are underway in both the state and municipal sectors where the collective agreements expire at the end of January. In the municipal sector JHL, the main public sector union, wants the minimum pay rate in the collective agreement to be raised to Euro 1,500 per month and family leave to be improved. JHL also aims to develop the status of employees in atypical employment relations and improve the rights of safety representatives.
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335; http://www.jhl.fi/uutinen/6237
The FOA public sector union says that pension reform in recent years has had an impact with 31% of its members taking early retirement in 2009, down from 41% in 2006. The union argues that this is one reason why further pension reform should not be on the agenda. FOA also points out that the issue has been raised again because of pressure on public finances and it says that it is outrageous that public finances should be used to bail out the finance sector with the consequence that demands are made to cut workers' pensions.
English: http://www.epsu.org/cob/335
Danish: http://www.foa.dk/Forbund/Presse.aspx?newsid={BDBF803C-D8DB-4428 ...
The GPA-DJP and vida trade unions have negotiated a 1.5% pay increase for the 80,000 workers covered by the BAGS collective agreement for private health and social care workers. The unions emphasize that the negotiations, taking some months, were tough and the negotiation results only made possible through the active involvement of works councillors and other members; on the 14 January action day, for example, 7,500 of them demonstrated. By 1 February 2010, all wages will be increased by at least 1.5%, including a floor of Euro 24 implying a 1.86% increase for the lowest wage scales. Some occupations will be re-graded in higher scales.
German: http://www.gpa-djp.at/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=GPA .
By strikes from 28 October 2009 on, the metal unions affiliated to CCOO and UGT succeeded to break through the wage freeze position of the central employers' organisations. A CCOO evaluation of collective bargaining concerning the 67 territorial metal agreements agreed learns that the average wage increase is set at 2.4%, allowing purchasing power to rise as inflation in 2009 was 0.8%. Yet, agreements have focused on pay increases and lack improvements in other fields.
Spanish: message of EUCOBAN network of EMF / EFFAT / ETUF-TCL / EMCEF
Dockworker union leaders have set a mid-February deadline for the government to respond to their demands for more waterfront jobs, or face industrial action. The CGT union, representing the majority of dockers, said it will launch in that case an indefinite work-to-rule campaign. The dockers already staged nationwide strikes on 4 and 11 January. The dispute centers on the transfer of around 2,000 container crane operators and maintenance staff from port authority payrolls to private stevedores (See also this Collective Bargaining Newsletter Year 2 December 2009).
English: http://www.joc.com/node/416082 via http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/show_news.pl?country=France