Labor strike likely to bring deadlock on Wednesday

The country is likely to experience a multi-industrial one-day strike on Wednesday protesting against a governmental plan to make dismissals easier at businesses with less than 20 workers.

However, the strike will hit major industries which would not benefit from the planned reform the hardest, while both long haul and commuter transit will remain largely unaffected.

Corporate spokespeople have been lamenting the cost. The technological industry gave their calculated loss as high as 70 million euros.

Ilkka Kaukoranta, chief economist of the Central Organization of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) said the strike is to show that the unions are serious about the situation and that the idea is to hurt.

Both the Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party) and the Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition Party-NCP) aimed, with the plan, to improve the business environment of small entrepreneurs.

The government has justified the plan as an employment measure based on the assumption that companies could hire more as the risk of being stuck with a bad worker would be reduced.

The trade unions and many experts have not accepted the explanation, but see the plan as a simple attack on employees. The reform may worsen the position of roughly a third of the labor force, and is being opposed by a wide front of the Finnish labor force. A refusal to work overtime and other softer measures have been used by the unions for several weeks.

In a rare breakaway from its usually pro-employers line, a Finnish language business daily newspaper Kauppalehti suggested in its editorial late last week that perhaps the plan should be given up as the resistance from the labor movement is so strong.

Kauppalehti said that a withdrawal could be sensible as a major conflict could push the Finnish economic development towards a downward trend. Kauppalehti quoted sources as saying that within the cabinet coalition there is preparedness to accept the opinion that more fighting with the unions makes no sense.

It is "political realism" that worsening the job security of citizens would not help any of the government parties in the general election next May, the Kauppalehti editorial said.

Several news media reported on Monday that the government is now planning to revise the plan and make the new law viable to companies with less than 10 workers only. But the strike wave looked unavoidable on Monday following the decision by the executive of SAK that they will not negotiate, and the whole reform must be canceled.

Labor Minister Jari Lindström said to media though that the strike is hardly avoidable now.

The cabinet under Prime Minister Juha Sipilä has been plagued with conflicts with trade unions since its first year in office in 2015.