Agreement for broadcasting technicians reached after industrial action

After 13 days of industrial action and almost one year of negotiations, a new collective agreement on wages and general terms of employment for technicians and administrators in Swedish public broadcasting was reached on 29 November 1998. The stumbling block was the organisation of working time.

At the end of 1997, the collective agreement on wages and general terms of employment between the Swedish Union of Clerical and Technical Employees in Industry (Svenska Industritjänstemannaförbundet, SIF) and the association which represents the small number of employers in public service broadcasting, Arbetsgivarföreningen, SRAO, expired and the parties started to negotiate a new agreement.

The agreement covers technicians and administrators. Some of them work on so-called "watch schedules", which means that the shifts may vary between five and 12 hours, all around the clock, and that the workers concerned have to work 11 nights or early mornings during a period of four weeks, and every second weekend. The employer has to inform the employees what shifts they will be working, two to four weeks in advance. The employers wanted to remove these limits from the central agreement, and refused to enter into any pay agreement as long as SIF did not comply with this claim.

On 17 November 1998, after nearly 11 months of fruitless negotiations, SIF began to impose an overtime ban and boycotted any new appointments on temporary contracts. As the employers were to a great extent reliant on overtime work and temporary employment, the trade union assumed that the action would prove to be effective fairly soon.

On 29 November 1998, the parties managed to reach an agreement. It runs retrospectively from 1 January 1998 until 31 March 2001 and is estimated to give pay increases of 8.5% for the whole period. The protective provisions on working time are unaltered in the new agreement. However, the individual companies and the local trade union branches will analyse and negotiate on how the rules can be adapted to the mission of the public service companies, within work environment requirements and without jeopardising the individual worker's opportunity to influence his or her working conditions.