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– An agreement has been reached. The strike has been called off and activity can be resumed, information manager Kolbjørn Andreassen at Norwegian Oil and Gas tells NRK.
The parties met at the Ombudsman at 10 am on Friday. Approximately eight and a half hours later, the agreement between Norwegian Oil and Gas and the Leaders was in effect.
– We are satisfied with the result. Now, activities at the affected facilities on the Norwegian platform can be resumed as soon as possible, Andreassen says.
The strike begins on September 30.
News that the strike ended pushed oil prices down, writes Bloomberg.
From overnight until Sunday, it was announced that the strike would intensify, which would mean that the Johan Sverdrup field would have to shut down all its production. A total of 169 Leader members were on strike when the conflict was resolved.
Satisfied with the agreement
Six fields have been out of production due to the strike, which was scheduled to intensify next week. A total of 13 of the fields on the Norwegian platform, most operated by Equinor, would be affected by the strike.
If the strike had lasted longer than October 14, the loss of production per day would be a total of 966,000 barrels of oil equivalent, according to Norwegian Oil and Gas.
The challenges in the negotiations have been that employees who previously worked on the shelf will now perform the same tasks as jobs from the ground control rooms.
However, the employer has not agreed that the collective agreement should apply to them.
– It has been a long road, we had to go to a labor struggle to make it happen, but now we have an agreement that deals with the members, says the union leader of the Leaders, Audun Ingvartsen, to NRK.
He says they have put a protocol in place that ensures full agreement for members managing the on-shelf installations.
According to Ingvartsen, the agreement means that employees in control rooms on the ground who are unionized in the Leaders will be treated the same as members of other unions.
New negotiations this spring
The parties set April 21 next year as the deadline to anchor the deal in an industry agreement.
– We will use the time until April 1 to implement the second part of the agreement, that is, a collective agreement for ground personnel, says Ingvartsen, who says that this agreement does not imply any real salary increase.
– We follow the industry. We expected to achieve more, but we did not achieve anything extra in terms of salary in this deal.
According to Oil and Gas, the deal involves a general supplement of NOK 4,700. It is the same as Industri Energi og Safe, which agreed with the business side on September 30.
Both Equinor and the operator Wintershall tell NRK that the fields affected by the strike will return to production as soon as possible.
– We immediately began to prepare for the commissioning of the fields that have been closed, says the spokesman for the Norwegian platform at Equinor, Morten Eek, to NRK.