Prime Minister Orpo repeated the same message he’s been repeating since Parliament welcomed a new year of meetings and debates in February. Orpo said the opposition’s speeches sound to him as if they hope the government will give up and abandon the core of the key reforms, which include cuts in social benefits and a proposal for a new law that would limit the duration of political strikes to 24 hours.
Orpo stressed several times that this “core” will not be retreated from.
So, companies such as the forestry giant UPM have announced that they will suspend wage payments at their paper mills, and another big fish in the paper industry, Stora Enso, is swimming in their wake by shutting down factories and suspending wage payments to workers whose work has been forced to stop.
Finland has reached a difficult impasse as Petteri Orpo’s government pushes through its labor market reforms and the trade union movement tries to force the government to the negotiating table with strikes that in some circles are considered “violent.”
Antti Lindtman, the leader of the main opposition party, the SDP, said that Finland could at worst be facing a “multi-year Armageddon.” The consequences, according to Lindtman, are difficult to assess.
His worst fear regarding the labor disputes is that “the confrontation will push the Finnish labor market into an almost permanent instability, where the seeds of conflict in future rounds of collective bargaining will be planted so deeply that they will have long-lasting effects.”
At the time of writing, the unions have decided to continue their strikes, originally planned for two weeks, for (at least) one more week.
The stevedores of AKT and some other port-related workers’ groups are joining the strikes from March 25 to April 1.
On Wednesday, Jarkko Eloranta, the president of SAK, met with work minister Satonen.
It became clear to Eloranta, that the government “was not ready to make compromises concerning the labor market situation, which is why it is necessary to continue the strike to defend employees and unemployed people.” Eloranta was speaking in a statement sent to the Finnish media on Thursday.
“The government and business are now looking for a clear victory over the Finnish worker,” Riku Aalto, the chairman of the Industrial Union, said in a statement. “As a result, we have entered a permanently troubled labor market. We continue to call for genuine negotiations on labor market changes. That is the only way to defuse the tension and restore industrial peace,” he added.
