Facts: Nobbed salary offer
LO has demanded 4.4 percent in one year in salary increases in this year’s salary negotiations, which are now in the middle of the race.
Last Friday, the industrial unions snubbed a wage offer from the mediators of 6.5 percent over two years in industry, the sector that usually sets the wage mark for the entire labor market.
Next week, unions and employers are expected to receive a final offer from the mediators.
The private food giants Ica and Axfood have had to stand in the firing line in the past week for the generous directors’ bonuses, while food prices skyrocket.
But LO chairman Susanna Gideonsson is at least as critical of member-owned Coop. Its origins were good goods, reasonably priced for common people.
“It seems that they have abandoned that idea altogether,” she says.
TT: Has Coop’s business model played its role?
— I absolutely do not think so, quite the opposite, their business model of being member-owned, of being there for ordinary people should be able to fly better than ever. But that’s not what they’re doing business on today, it seems to be something else that’s more important, says Gideonsson, who notes that the only company, Lidl, that has started to lower prices, was the one that wasn’t invited to the finance minister’s special meeting about the high food prices this week.
Increased more in price
She points out that the stores’ own brands, which Coop was once the first to offer and which all stores more or less carry these days, have increased the most in price.
It is also confirmed by Matpriskollen’s runs. Over the past year, February 2022 to February 2023, food prices have generally increased by 16.3 percent, while the food giants’ own brands have increased by 17.1 percent.
It shouldn’t look like that, Gideonsson thinks.
— They control those goods themselves, how they choose to profile them.
Matpriskollen’s studies also show that Coop was in the lead after the New Year and raised food prices the most of the big dragons.
Take a bigger piece of the cake
The traders themselves, Ica, Axfood and Coop, say that the situation is tough now, that they are only forced to go along when the food producers raise their prices at least as much.
— Yes, maybe so, but they have gone like a train for a row of years. Unfortunately, it seems that they have taken out a higher level of profit than they have done historically, says Gideonsson, who has a background in trade.
Profit shares have risen at the expense of wage earners in recent years, even among companies outside trade, according to Gideonsson. It is based on statistics from the Norwegian Economic Institute.
“We have to take a bigger piece of the cake so that this trend doesn’t continue,” says Gideonsson before the final spurt in this year’s big wage movement.