The trade unions representing 130,000 state employees and 338,500 workers in local and state authorities have indicated that they will not accept a lower pay rise than their private sector counterparts in anticipation of the wage negotiations starting on 27 April. Leaders of the four main unions involved have made this abundantly clear. Jan Davidsen, president of the Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees (NUMGE), with 300,000 members the largest union in the LO confederation, even said to believe that the state and local workers’ deal would be better than the one agreed during private sector negotiations “because of the lag in wage growth and what management has received in the state sector.”
English: http://www.newsinenglish.no/2011/04/27/state-unions-to-demand ...
This article was published in the Collective Bargaining Newsletter. It aims to facilitate information exchange between trade unions and to support the work of ETUC's collective bargaining committee. For more information, please contact the editor Maarten van Klaveren, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2011.