News

At a press conference on 22^nd March Handels President Lars-Anders Häggström announced that 6 weeks of futile negotiations have left the trade union with no other option than to call a strike. Initially it will affect 5207 workers in workplaces all over Sweden. Handels represent 70 % of the workers in the retail sector and 88% of the workforce in wholesale.





As negotiations went on the employers' organisation Svensk Handel would not accept any changes to their proposal which would have prolonged the current agreement for 1 year putting a freeze on areas such as the minimum wage. Though Swedish economy in general has been hard hit by the global crisis, the retail sector has not suffered as bad and several retail companies have published good results in their annual reports.

Lars-Anders Häggström, President of Handels

If it becomes necessary to implement the strike, it will come at the end of the renegotiations of the current national collective agreement which was signed three years ago. The Swedish employers’ federation chose a new strategy this year which means that all settlements would have to be unanimously accepted by their members or they would be rejected. As a result even, if the commerce employers’ organisation Swedish Commerce (Svensk Handel) would accept Handels’ proposal, the result might still be turned down if the employers from other sectors were to say no.



Therefore, the strike is also about addressing what seems to be a lack of democracy in the manner that the negotiations on the national collective agreement have been conducted.





The Handels union is Sweden's third-biggest blue-collar labour group and has about 150,000 members. The union is represented at more than 25,000 work places in the Nordic country.