A strike by 3,000 dockers that crippled Finland's foreign trade for more than two weeks is to end, after both sides accepted a compromise agreement, the conciliator's office said Friday. "They have accepted the proposal and the walkout will end," Outi Pelkonen, secretary at National Conciliator Esa Lonka's office, told AFP.
Lonka presented his proposal to the Transport Workers Union (AKT) and the Finnish Port Operators Association after marathon talks that ran into the early hours of Friday. Work at Finnish ports will resume "as soon as possible" and at latest on Tuesday, both sides said on their websites.
The agreement ends weeks of wrangling over key sticking points such as severance pay and the use of sub-contract labour, and comes a day after tensions mounted in the south-eastern port of Kotka where strikers tried to block non-union workers from restarting operations. Before the strike brought all of Finland's commercial ports to a virtual standstill on March 4, worker-management relations had been soured by wildcat walkouts at some of Finland's biggest ports and a ban on working overtime.
Umbrella organisations for both the workers and employers were brought in this week to help to speed up negotiations, which Lonka called "difficult" in an interview with national broadcaster YLE. "For society, it is extres. Around 80 percent of Finland's foreign trade travels through seaports, and the strike was seen as a blow to the export-reliant country, which is scrambling to recover from the global economic downturn.
The key forestry sector was forced to shut plants and temporarily lay off workers as storage space and raw materials ran out, and technology industries said they also suffered from a lack of components and raw materials.