HELSINKI: The Finnish Meteorological Institute has decided to cut jobs of 25 persons following co-operation negotiations in a move to reach its savings target.
Manual measurements and observations as well as the number of support and research personnel will be reduced in Helsinki and FMI’s regional offices, said a press release of the institute issued on Tuesday. In addition to redundancies, savings are generated through retirements and efficiency measures.
The FMI Director General Petteri Taalas said it was very unfortunate to let some of the personnel go in order to achieve significant savings targets. “Our decisions are based on changes in the operating environment as well as efficiency opportunities offered by automation and digitalisation. Our goal is to ensure that we can meet our customers’ needs in the future, and enhance productivity and cost efficiency,” the Director General adds.
Due to the change, the aviation weather services in Tampere-Pirkkala will be shut down by the end of 2015, but observations will still continue in Tampere-Pirkkala, said the FMI release issued on Tuesday.At the same time, structural changes will be implemented in weather services in Helsinki. In addition, retirements in 2015–16 will add up to savings of approximately 1.75 million euros. Rental costs of regional offices will also decrease which would help FMI reach the savings goal.
The objective of the co-operation negotiations, which began in March, was to find the means to achieve a savings goal of 4.6 million euros. At the beginning of negotiations, it was estimated that the need to cut personnel was at most 85 persons by 2016.
