Citing public pressure, the Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee on February 20 altered its draft amendments to the law on collective bargaining, mandating that parties give at least six month's notice before unilaterally pulling out of an indefinite agreement. Yet, the change marks a slight concession from the version of the Collective Agreement Act amendments approved by the committee on February 13, which allowed the parties to cancel with just three months' notice, but is nowhere near the two years that the nions had demanded. Under the law, a collective agreement becomes indefinite by default when it expires. But whereas the current law makes the terms of the agreement binding after that time, the amended version allows an employer to cancel the contract. On 18 February, several thousand workers on a union rally in Tallinn gathered to protest the planned changes to the law, which union leaders say are being rushed through without their input.
English: http://news.err.ee/politics/619ee017-b510-42cc-81b5-0d346dcaf7e1
http://news.err.ee/politics/61cce4da-ee2d-4a76-a9e3-03968caff6d8
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 future editor – as from the March 2012 issue – Jan Cremers, at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS) cbn-aias@uva.nl, or Mariya Nikolova mnikolova@etui.org, communications officer at the ETUI. The editor of this issue was Maarten van Klaveren, M.vanKlaveren@uva.nl. For previous issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit http://www.etui.org/E-Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter. You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org, and on the AIAS at www.uva-aias.net. © ETUI aisbl, Brussels 2012. To unsubscribe, please contact Mariya Nikolova.