Marketing and communication is the wild west in terms of work

The terms of employment are widely unknown and not so often followed in the field of advertising, media, digital media and marketing research. Almost half of the employers in this field do not follow any kind of collective agreement on terms of work.

New salary recommendations for these marketing and communication field were published in 2011. More than half of employees (in Finnish, palkansaaja) working in advertising agencies, digital media agencies or marketing research organizations in Finland felt, that recommendation of salaries were useful or very useful regarding their position. Already third of the employees took advantage of these recommendations when negotiating about their salaries.

Characteristic for these fields of industries is that only third of the employers knew about the salary recommendations. The same goes with the framework agreement for the terms of work. There are terms of work for the industries that do not have their own collective agreement yet, but they are rarely used in marketing and communications.

The hope of the employees is to get field-specific collective agreements in these industries. This would, however, require more organized actions by employee’s side. At the moment the employees in marketing and communications tend to get interested of their rights and possibilities only when the employer cuts their benefits.

There are no employee representatives in half of the work places – or at least the employees do not know, whether this person exists or not. Still more than 70 percent of employees would like to have employee representative in their work place.

It is not only for the good of employees to get collective agreement for the terms of work, or have employee representative in the work place or follow salary recommendations. The employer who follows collective agreement and salary recommendations does not need to negotiate the salary or the terms of work individually with every employee - and employee representatives are useful for both parties in the moments of change, which are more than common in the fields of advertising agencies, digital media agencies or marketing research.

The recommendation of salaries for the fields of advertising, media research and digital media in Finland were published by the Finnish Federation of Special Service and Clerical Employees ERTO, a labor union (in Finnish, ay-liike) of employees working in expert positions in the private service sector, together with the MaMA Ry, which is the organization for marketing and communications specialist, researchers and specialist of the digital media in 2011.