It has been three years since Prime Minister Juha Sipilä managed to wrest an accord labour market leaders in a bid to boost national competitiveness -- the so-called competitiveness pact.
Some measures, such as a 30-percent holiday pay cut agreed in the accord will be implemented for the last time this year.
"It will naturally affect my holiday plans. Of course I'll manage but I've heard some colleagues say that they will have to forego trips or other plans," said early years education teacher Miia Keränen.
Keränen and other municipal and state workers will get a somewhat plumper pay cheque at the end of January to ease the pain of the vacation pay reduction -- to the tune of 9.2 percent of their monthly pay.
In addition, at the time that the competitiveness deal had been agreed, the government had pledged to introduce a package of tax breaks valued at more than 400 million euros.
"Longer working hours here to stay"
Parties to the deal also agreed to extend working time to the equivalent of 24 hours a year, or six minutes every day. For municipal and government workers like Keränen, that means half an hour every week.
"It's a significant extension of working time. We already had long work days. It seems unreasonable that both holiday pay cuts and longer working days have affected low-income female-dominated fields in particular," Keränen commented.
Employers have said however that this is not the end of the extended hours measure. Markku Jalonen, labour market director of the organisation representing municipal employers, said he expects to see the policy in play in 2020.
"The holiday pay reductions are fixed-term and will end, but the extension of working hours is permanent because it has been written into collective agreements," he noted.
Call for a one-off 'equality payment'
Millariikka Rytkönen is chair of Tehy, the union representing health care workers. She said her organisation is not prepared to continue working longer hours indefinitely. She said she will be closely following collective bargaining talks in the export sector, the benchmark for the measures rolled out in the competitiveness pact.
Last October, five sectors represented by the Industrial Workers Union announced that they would no longer work the additional 24 hours a year. Rytkönen predicted that the next round of salary negotiations in the health sector will be difficult.
She has called for an "equality" payment for women-dominated fields, adding that nothing else seems likely to help close the gender pay gap.
"People aren't joking about this out there. We want an equality payment so that our workers can continue performing the important and difficult work they're doing," she declared.
