Central Finland county plan to widen staff work areas angers union

Central Finland’s wellbeing services county plans to expand the work area of about 7,500 employees to cover the entire region, enabling staff to be moved between municipalities when needed. The proposal has drawn strong opposition from the health and social care union Tehy, Yle reports.

The county’s budget proposal, published Tuesday, says the work area for its employees would in future cover the whole county. Currently, an employee’s work area may be limited to a particular municipality. The change could, for example, allow a nurse working at Nova Hospital in Jyväskylä to be transferred to Äänekoski if required.

Most of the affected employees work in health care. The county has more than 12,600 employees in total. Since 2023, new employees have agreed in their contracts to a broader work area.

Tehy described the proposed change as “irrational and unjustified” in a statement issued in late September. The union’s head of advocacy, Jarkko Pehkonen, said the county was seeking the right to decide employees’ work locations, even though those locations are matters of agreement.

Acting county director Lasse Leppä said the county’s services are becoming more regional, making a shared work area a natural consequence. He said the aim was not to move employees far from home, but to arrange work as close as possible to where they live. The county’s HR director, Eija-Liisa Heikkilä, said staff would continue to work mainly at their current locations and that the county did not intend to make unjustified transfers.

Tehy says the change could allow employees to be assigned permanently to a workplace hundreds of kilometres away, with travel time and costs falling on the employee. Heikkilä said the employee’s main workplace would still be defined under the collective agreement, and travel expenses would be paid based on that location.

The county is considering the expansion in co-operation negotiations covering its entire staff. Heikkilä said existing employment contracts would not need to be replaced; instead, the county would change the terms of employment. The expansion could allow other staff changes to be made without co-operation negotiations, although the county would still hold negotiations if it needed to reduce its workforce. Tehy says the collective agreement requires a specific workplace to be stated in each employment contract, even when the work area is broad.