The 24-hour strike will begin on May 27th at 00:01 and end at 23:59, if no solution is reached regarding the working conditions and salary increases for university employees before then. Conciliation continues today, Monday, May 12th.
The strike covers all jobs under the General Collective Agreement for Universities. Exemptions from the strike include IT on-call services and essential maintenance of IT backbone services, essential care of samples and animals, and tasks whose omission would pose a danger to human life or health or significant risk to property.
No agreement on salary increases or teaching hour cap
Negotiations for the university collective agreement have been ongoing for over three months. For the past three weeks, the labour dispute has been intensively conciliated under the leadership of the national conciliator, but no settlement proposal has been reached yet.
The key contentious issues in the negotiations are salary increases and the teaching hour cap, which protects those engaged in teaching and research from excessive workloads.
Teaching, research, and the supporting administration form the educational foundation of society.
“The future of all of Finland is built on expertise, and it is the university employees who create it. Therefore, fair, general increase-focused salary increases and working conditions that support well-being are not a matter of negotiation but a necessity,” emphasize JUKO, Pro, and JHL.
There are thirteen universities in Finland, employing a total of 35,000 people.
The labour dispute in a nutshell
• JUKO aims for salary increases that improve purchasing power and solutions to the increased workload of staff in the university collective agreement negotiations.
• University staff have not been offered salary increases in line with the general level.
• The Finnish Education Employers, representing university employers, is pushing for the removal of teaching hour caps.
• Teaching hour caps are an essential and important protective mechanism written into the collective agreement, which protects teaching and research staff from being overburdened at work. Teaching hour caps are important to all university sector unions representing JUKO’s teaching and research staff and their members.
• Negotiations have been ongoing intensively since early February, and the contract period ended at the end of March. Despite active negotiation efforts, no solutions were found at the negotiating table. In mid-April, the labour dispute was referred to the national conciliator.
• As a solution, JUKO has proposed, for example, local agreements and working group work based on research and expertise to explore how working time regulations could be developed from a university perspective.
Up-to-date information on the conciliation can also be found on JUKO’s Facebook (in Finnish).
University facts 2025
• Collective agreements | Universities’ general collective agreement and the provisions on teacher training schools
• Agreement period | 1st April, 2023 – 31st March, 2025
• Main contractual parties | JUKO, Trade Union Pro, Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors JHL, and Finnish Education Employers
• JUKO’s negotiators | Head of Collective Bargaining Katja Aho (JUKO), University Advisory Board Chair and Executive Director Tarja Niemelä (Finnish Union of University Professors), Special Adviser Hanna Tanskanen (Trade Union of Education, OAJ), Negotiations Manager Petri Toiviainen (Social Science Professionals), and Negotiations Manager Reetta Kuosmanen (The Union of Research Professionals)
