This is LO Top’s goal for your salary this year – VG

Leader Jørn Eggum at Fellesforbundet says he believes the goal in this year’s pay settlement is to retain purchasing power.

– It is the LO supervisory council that decides and will meet on Tuesday. But if you ask me, the natural starting point for this year’s interim deal is that purchasing power is preserved.

– So it did not increase purchasing power, but an agreement of about 2.6 percent, which is the estimated price growth this year?

– In the era of the crown in which we find ourselves, with high unemployment and great uncertainty, my assessment is that retaining purchasing power is the level that is natural to reach. Even then, those with the lowest wages should get more, Eggum tells VG.

Eggum leads Fellesforbundet, the largest private sector union in LO, leading the pay deals, in so-called front-line negotiations.

There are negotiations within selected industries of the industry, competing with companies abroad, so the deal will not be better for employees than competitive companies can afford.

The Technical Calculation Committee (TBU) arrived on Monday with its first preliminary figures, for last year’s wage growth.

Shows that the annual salary per. The man-year for an industrial worker has reached NOK 506,100, after last year’s salary rose by two percent.

By comparison, government employees earn 623,000 and salaried employees in industry 802,000 crowns.

– The most efficient industrial workers in the world

Industrial workers are now praised by the ‘counterpart’, the boss of employers in industry, Stein Lier-Hansen at Norsk Industri.

– We have the most efficient industrial workers in the world. They are extremely important for maintaining and improving productivity, says Lier-Hansen.

– In that sense, it is well deserved that they have spent half a million salary. At the same time, it is important to say that they cannot have a higher salary than the industry can pay, he says and adds:

– It is the industry that sells its goods abroad that is absolutely crucial: wages cannot be higher than the company that can sell its goods abroad. If wages are so high that they are not allowed to sell the products, jobs are threatened, he says.

– Lowest in 20 years

Eggum says that increased efficiency has made the wage gap between Norway and the countries we compete with the lowest in twenty years.

– Our hourly wage costs are now only twenty percent lower than in our competing countries. That’s the smallest difference since 2001, he says.

According to TBU’s preliminary report, industrial worker wage growth last year was two percent. This is a bit surprising, because the framework for wage settlement that the industry set was 1.7 percent.

Caused

It provokes, among other things, those organized in the public sector.

In the healthcare sector and in Spekter companies outside of healthcare trusts, TBU’s annual salary growth is estimated at 1.75 percent. For government employees, annual wage growth is 1.8 percent, which is roughly where the salary cap was set at 1.7 percent.

– When those who establish the framework for the frontal subject do not follow it in practice, it provokes us. This should lead to our members in the public sector being prioritized in this year’s pay deal, says Unio leader Ragnhild Lied.

The front-line issues he refers to are some selected industrial areas, which set the framework for settlements in Norway.

She emphasizes that in the 2020 agreement, moderation was highlighted as more important than ever due to financial challenges related to the pandemic.

In last year’s deal, there was, among other things, a debate about whether healthcare workers who were in the middle of the corona infection crisis deserved an extra good deal.

Business and Financial Salary Winners

But other groups managed to get out much more:

For now, retail appears to be winning:

Annual salary growth from 2019 to 2020 for Virke’s businesses in retail is currently estimated at 3.5 percent, including one percentage point in bonuses.

And in finance, salary growth is currently estimated at 3.25 percent.

Explain the asymmetry in the preliminary figures.

Lier-Hansen says the Unio boss and others don’t need to get unnecessarily excited.

– This is a very preliminary commission report and we should wait until the main report arrives. The reason for this is that all the layoffs have meant that the statistics are probably skewed and that wages have not risen as much, even for the industrial worker and those who work the cashier in stores.

Explain why.

– When the pandemic struck and large groups were laid off, it particularly affected low-wage workers and to a lesser extent beyond, for example, salaried employees. When industrial and coffers workers were laid off, their salary evolution was not included in the statistics.

The technical calculation committee is low in its assessment of inflation for 2021: They estimate that the consumer price will increase 2.6 percent this year.

This is much lower than what, for example, the government has included in the state budget, where inflation was estimated at 3.5 percent.

The settlement begins on March 15.

TBU is a composite sample of the parties in working life and the authorities, which prepares the numerical basis for the settlement of wages.

This year’s settlement begins with claims filing on March 15.

This is a so-called interim agreement, where it is primarily wages that must be dealt with at the negotiating table, and not the main questions of principle that are often raised in so-called main agreements.

The main settlement and the provisional settlement follow one another, so that next year there is a main settlement.