UPM and the Paperworkers’ Union have agreed on their first-ever business-specific collective labor agreements for five UPM businesses. The strike at UPM mills in Finland will end immediately and employees will return to work.
The strike covered UPM Pulp, UPM Communication Papers, UPM Specialty Papers, UPM Raflatac and UPM Biofuels units in Finland. UPM will restart customer deliveries as soon as possible.
The contract period of the new agreements is four years. Pay increases are in line with the current industry norm. Revisions to wages will be negotiated after the first two years. New agreements are structurally less complicated than the old one, and the number of pages is about half of the earlier.
A significant change in all business-specific agreements is the substitution of periodical pay with hourly pay. Hourly wages are paid by the work done, making the formulation of the pay easier to understand. New collective labor agreements make it possible to take competence and performance into account in wage formulation. All businesses also agreed on added flexibility to shift arrangements and the use of working time.
UPM Pulp agreed on switching to uninterrupted 365-day running of the pulp mills and more flexible use of workforce during the long maintenance shutdowns. Restrictions on the use of fixed-term employees were removed.
UPM Communication Papers, the company’s graphic paper business, agreed on additional hours and flexible use of working time, which are essential for smooth operation. Depending on the working time format, working hours will increase by 24-32 hours per year, except for day work, where the working hours remain unchanged. With the changeover to hourly pay, the extra hours increase earnings accordingly.
On weekly level, the increase of working hours is about half an hour per week. In addition, an encouraging pay system was agreed, which improves particularly the earnings of maintenance and day work. The agreement includes a wage payment guarantee for the first two years of the contract period.
The Paperworkers Union’s strike at most UPM mills in Finland began on January 1, 2022, and lasted almost four months. Originally, approximately 2,100 members of the union went on strike, but approximately 200 of them were ordered to uphold tasks critical to society, such as heat generation and water management, by a court order.
