In the midst of the first collective bargaining negotiations as chairman of the 565,000 staff represented by the Bargaining Community, FOA & apos ;s chairman, Mona Striib, turns 60 on Friday 12 February.
The responsibility is great, but it suits Mona Striib well to be at the forefront, she says.
– It suits my temperament well. The desire to take responsibility and make a community work is great with me.
It was the same basic feeling that made Mona Striib a shop steward for the unskilled at Danfoss when she was just 18 years old.
– The desire to take responsibility and to change what I think is unfair was there very early. I do not think that is a decision. It is something that is happening, she says about her path into the trade union movement and towards the top.
The negotiations this time around are not just special because Mona Striib is sitting at the end of the table for the first time. The corona crisis also makes the circumstances very special.
For Mona Striib, it only increases the fighting spirit that her members, which include social and health workers and cleaning assistants, are some of those who have “really worked hard” during the corona crisis.
They deserve more in salary and preferably a salary increase in kroner and øre rather than percent, says one of her fads.
Of the recent findings that Mona Striib has on her resume are a number of tripartite agreements with the government and employers. Among other things, about better student conditions and more educational places and working conditions during the corona crisis.
It was in 1980 that she was elected as a shop steward for the SiDs at Danfoss in Kolding.
After a number of years as an earth and concrete worker, she was employed in home care in Kolding, as the hard job did not match well with a life as a pregnant mother of small children. Here she was elected shop steward in 1990.
A position as deputy chairman and later chairman of FOA Kolding became a deputy chairman of FOA in 2004.
She held it for 14 years before she took over the post as federal chairman after Dennis Kristensen in 2018. In 2019, she became chairman of the Negotiating Community after Anders Bondo Christensen.
The birthday is celebrated “with the snout in the track of the collective bargaining negotiations”, says Mona Striib. A morning meeting at Teams with a cup of coffee in hand – and then off to the negotiating room.
Mona Striib lives in Frederikssund. She has three grown children and three grandchildren.
Source: The Nordic Page