The increases are in line with the recent framework agreement by the central labour market organizations, which fixed pay ceilings for some 94% of all salaried employees in Finland. They will receive a 2.4% pay increase this autumn, and a further 1.9% increase the same time next year.The exceptionally broad based framework agreement also brings in government policy actions, which provide for a slight increase in unemployment benefit, and include a guarantee concerning paid leave for employees, according to the system job alternation leave. Under this employees may take several months leave as long as unemployed job seekers are hired for a fixed period in their place. Employees on job alternation leave will receive benefits calculated according to each employee’s deferred unemployment benefit. Initially, the government had threatened to cut these benefits as part of its programme of savings cuts.Journalists have also used the framework agreement as a basis for their own contractual pay agreements. Such agreements were concluded for the public broadcaster, YLE, publishing editors, and film and TV production companies. Commercial TV broadcasting is not covered by the framework agreement. The Union of Journalists has proposed a salary increase for the commercial broadcaster MTV slightly higher than that of the framework agreement, because of the company’s record profits.Next year, TV4’s news operations will merge with Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest national daily, and TV4 now needs a short period of transition that does not come under the terms of the framework agreement. The merger will result in an entirely new system in Finland that will generate news for TV in addition to the production of the print and online newspaper. The Union of Journalists will continue collective bargaining with commercial TV.Newspaper and magazine journalists were also offered the framework agreement, though pay increases for them were already agreed in last spring. These increases surpass those of the frame and so the print press also remained outside the framework agreement. The collective bargaining agreement for newspaper and magazine journalists elapses in spring 2013, while the framework agreement lasts until the autumn of the same year.