Helsinki (06.09.2002 - Juhani Artto) Since the 1980s the favoured mantra of employers in Finland, as in many other countries, has been flexibility. Employer representatives have criticised labour and the trade unions for defending "overly rigid" working hours, pay scales, social security norms and other "inflexibilities" in collective agreements and legislation. This, they say, undermines the international competitiveness of enterprises based in Finland.
A new study prepared by several reputable researchers has now refuted the main contention of this approach. The authors claim that labour flexibility was one of the key factors, if not the principal factor - that turned the deep recession of the early 1990s into a sustained period of rapid economic growth.
What kind of flexibility do the researchers mean? Over the period from 1990 to 1995 up to 23 per cent of workers in urban regions changed their occupations. The frequency was highest in accounting and commerce. Almost one third of those who adopted a new occupation were unemployed, and more than a quarter had no previous vocational training. The rate of regional mobility was also high.
Atypical forms of work rapidly became much more common. In the late 1980s a single, regular, full-time job was almost a norm for those in work. Nowadays, however, one job in four falls into an atypical category such as part-time, temporary or agency work.
"We may even speak of excessive flexibility," is the comment of Kirsti Palanko-Laaka, who leads the work environment department at Finland’s largest trade union confederation SAK. "The increased flexibility has been managed well in part, when based on local agreements, but also poorly. Nowadays manpower usage often resembles the Wild West."
Negative consequences can be seen in cases where employees have lost the ability to manage their lives and to combine work with family life. The increased stress that is closely associated with flexibility also causes an alarming incidence of mental disorders, and characterises the badly managed aspect of contemporary working life.
Both Palanko-Laaka and the researchers stress that continuous rapid changes in working life can be socially acceptable only when social safety nets function properly.
"Casual workers, for example, require a social security reform to achieve some kind of predictable and balanced income", says the research project leader, professor Pertti Koistinen of Tampere University.
The leader writer of Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest circulation daily newspaper, interprets the main conclusion of the study by dividing labour into two categories according to flexibility. Firstly, there are the young workers who sustained the explosive growth of the IT sector. The writer believes that there was a highly voluntary character involved in approving extremely flexible working conditions in this sector.
Other workers who showed willingness to accept greater flexibility in their working conditions did so, according to the Helsingin Sanomat leader, in the absence of any viable alternative.
*Pertti Koistinen and Werner Sengenberger (ed.), "Labour flexibility, A Factor of the Economic and Social Performance of Finland in the 1990s", (pdf)