Trade Union News from Finland

Helsinki (27.11.2002 - Juhani Artto) Less than two per cent of people living permanently in Finland in 2001 were foreign citizens. Compared to most other industrialised countries this figure is very low. However, Finland’s foreign population increased rapidly in the 1990s.

In 1989, only 21,100 foreigners lived permanently in Finland. In the following twelve years this number increased more than fourfold, and is now about 100,000 in a country of 5.2 million people. Russians (23 per cent) form the largest immigrant group, followed by Estonians (12 per cent) and Swedes (8 per cent).

These growing immigrant flows transformed Finland into a net receiver of migrants. In the past the flow was very much in the opposite direction, with people tending to leave Finland. More than one million Finns and their descendants live abroad, mainly in Sweden, the USA, Canada and Australia.

For decades the most important motive for this emigration from Finland was always the expectation of work and a better livelihood than Finland could offer.

Until the early 1990s most Finnish employers had never been in a position to choose whether to employ a Finn or a foreigner, since there was virtually no labour of foreign origin. Finnish shop floor workers and salaried employees had equally little experience of foreigners at their places of work. The situation that emerged in the 1990s was also new to most of the Ministry of Labour staff who assist jobseekers.

In a thesis* published in September 2002 researcher Annika Forsander analyses the situation of foreigners in the Finnish labour market. The most striking statistic in this field is the unemployment rate, which is roughly three times higher than the rate among Finns. Although the unemployment rate for foreigners decreased from 53 per cent in 1994 to 31 per cent in 2000, the corresponding rate for Finns fell more quickly over the same period.

Most did not arrive for work

In the course of her study Forsander sampled one third of the immigrants arriving in Finland over the period 1989-1993. Her sample thereby comprised 10,485 people. Citizens of Sweden were excluded from the sample.

Table 1 gives an idea of the labour market situation of immigrants in the year of arrival and in 1997, after remaining in Finland for periods of between four and eight years.
 

Table 1.

The low employment rate in the year of arrivals indicates that only a minority moved to Finland to take up jobs that had already been secured. The majority settled in Finland for family reasons, as refugees, as students or, as in the case of Ingrians, were classified as returnees from the territory of the former Soviet Union. It is only in the last few years that the number of immigrants coming to Finland specifically to work has begun to increase rapidly.

The data analysed by Forsander indicate that in successive years an increasing number of immigrants arriving in 1989-1993 found jobs, started their own businesses or embarked on courses of study. However this tendency was weaker for the later years of arrival. Forsander explains this through differences in immigrant profiles for various years. In the earlier years of arrival there were more immigrants from industrialised Western countries. These immigrants have enjoyed a higher labour market status than immigrants from other regions.

The Ministry of Labour documents the huge difference in employment between immigrants from various countries of origin, with French immigrants in the leading position and Iraqis at the tail end.

Service industry important for employment

Besides Westerners, other well-employed national groups include the Chinese, Indians, Turks and immigrants from Eastern Asia and Eastern Central Europe. The Asians have moved to Finland mainly to work. The Turks are mostly men, married to Finnish women. Catering is one industry that supports many Indians, Chinese and Turks, both as entrepreneurs and as employees.

Unlike the situation in the other Nordic countries, immigrants from Eastern Central Europe seem to have a similar labour market status as immigrants from elsewhere in Europe.

Of all groups, Estonian citizens have most clearly improved their status during the period reviewed. Most Estonians moved to Finland as Ingrian returnees or spouses of Finnish citizens. Their competitive edge in the Finnish labour market has probably been the fact that the Estonian language is broadly similar to Finnish. Geographical and cultural proximity also helps in accumulating the cultural and social capital that eases advancement in the labour market.

Inroads to working life have also been found in public transport and cleaning. Forsander's study indicates that one fifth of bus drivers in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area are immigrants. The increase in immigrant drivers is partly due to competitive tendering of public service bus lines, Forsander remarks. This undermined job security and also led to other unpleasant changes in the working conditions of bus drivers, making the work less attractive for Finns. Private and public transport companies therefore had to recruit drivers of foreign origin as well.

One fifth of the labour force of large cleaning enterprises in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area are also immigrants. However, there are still so few immigrants in Finland that no industry has gained a reputation for mainly offering only "immigrant work", with a consequent downgraded public image in Finland. In countries with a longer and more extensive history of immigration this kind of "immigrant work" label has already been applied to several trades.

Jobseekers rejected on untenable grounds

Many immigrants work as teachers of their native language. Some teach children of their own immigrant community, while others have Finns as their students. Even in the late 1980s teacher was the most common trade among immigrants in Finland. Many teachers have received at least some professional training in their countries of origin before moving to Finland.

Teaching one’s native language is an example of an ethno-specific profession. Although most of these professions demand a good education and professional skill, in most cases such employment is unstable.

The Chinese – originating from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan – form the immigrant group that is internally most diverse by trade. At one end of this trade spectrum are highly educated technical specialists, while at the other end there are restaurant workers with little or no education.

Forsander's data emphasise the importance of social networks. The crucial initial entry to the labour market has often depended on relatives, neighbours, friends or other social contacts, as opposed to educational certificates and work experience. Referring to Kathleen Valtonen’s study (The Integration of Refugees in Finland on the 1990s) (pdf), Forsander offers a tragicomic list of employer "strategies" for countering immigrant jobseekers:

• not reacting to the job application at all,
• open rejection by stating that the company does not employ foreigners,
• empty promises of later contact by telephone,
• demanding perfect competence in Finnish and/or Swedish,
• falsely stating that the vacancy has already been filled,
• requiring Finnish citizenship even when the work does not demand this,
• explaining that other employees or customers would oppose recruitment of a foreigner.

The data gathered and analysed by Forsander suggest on the whole that ethnic discrimination is a significant factor that undermines immigrant employment prospects. "The strategies used by employers indicate a lack of confidence in immigrants," Forsander concludes.

Trade union movement working on two fronts

Ethnic discrimination is also a major challenge for a trade union movement, which finds itself working on two fronts, fighting ethnic discrimination and social dumping pertaining to the foreign labour force. The latter aspect includes a growing problem of illegal immigrant labour, although this remains a marginal phenomenon compared to the southern Member States of the European Union.

The trade union movement has so far reacted cautiously to the challenges on these two fronts. While the first steps have been taken to integrate immigrant labour into the unions, a more visible effort has been made to secure a long transition period as part of the European Union eastern enlargement process. The highest profile action so far was taken by the Construction Worker Union recently, combining a short stoppage with on-site checks to expose the employment of illegal foreign labour.

The backward attitudes of employers may soon cause problems for Finnish people as a whole. If the prognosis of a worsening labour shortage materialises, then the best solution would be to open up the labour market not only officially but also in practice. In five to ten years the most promising factor affecting the status of immigrants in the labour market may be the structural ageing of the Finnish labour force.

At the same time employers are increasingly calling for greater flexibility in working conditions. Both Finnish and immigrant labour has suffered from a growing tendency for jobs to become more unstable and from increased pressure to adapt to atypical work. This is nothing new for immigrants. According to Forsander, only 5 per cent of the immigrants who arrived in 1989-1993, had managed to secure a stable career by 1997. About 60 per cent were engaged in an "unstable", and 28 per cent in a "marginal" career. The remaining 7 per cent had remained outside of the job market.

In the Finnish social welfare system a weak position in the labour market also means an inferior status as a beneficiary of social programmes. Shorter careers and lower pay mean lower income-related social benefits for unemployment, sick leave, maternity and pension. Immigrants are over-represented among social welfare programme beneficiaries receiving only minimum benefits, Forsander notes. However, some immigrants from poor countries do not regard Finnish minimum benefits as too bad compared to the situation that they left in their countries of origin.

Daryl Taylor adds:

While Annikka Forsander’s thesis is obviously a welcome addition to the literature of an under-researched subject, a word of caution is necessary in understanding some of the claims made in this area.

One obvious and oddly persistent weakness in most statistical reviews of foreigners in Finland concerns alleged "reasons" for migration. However, the data in this area come from administrative decisions on residence permits, and must be understood in terms of how such data are gathered and processed by the public authorities concerned. This also includes the impact of the administrative system itself on the information provided by foreign applicants.

Researchers tend to assume that the grounds for issuing residence permits must somehow correspond to the motivation of the applicants or otherwise provide useful general information about them. However, the information provided by applicants seeking a certain benefit from a highly formalised administrative system will not necessarily correspond to information provided in a sociological survey.

Finland’s immigration system restricts the type of information that can be recorded and the format in which this information is interpreted. Immigrants also tend to become conditioned, to some extent, in how they respond to questions on this subject. For example, the system does not record mixed motivation at all (and applicants who list several reasons for their applications are regularly asked to identify the "most important" of these), and it is often a matter of pure chance how applicants with mixed reasons for coming to Finland are classified by the system.

For many university students and highly educated migrant workers the primary reason for immigrating was neither studies nor work, but a pre-existing family-type relationship with a person already living in Finland. Even the immigration motives of a person who is married to a Finnish citizen cannot be regarded as fully explained by the family tie alone, and further investigation is necessary to discover why the family has chosen to live together in Finland and not elsewhere.

The "survey question" posed by the Finnish immigration system should therefore not be understood as: "why do you want to come to Finland?" Instead, it is more like: "why should we allow you to come to Finland?" The relevance to the Finnish labour market of the answer to this question is at least highly debatable.

Daryl Taylor is the Deputy Chairman
of the Advisory Board for Ethnic Relations

Read more:

•  Legal foreign labour force in Finland doubles in two years, (24.05.2002)
•  Union call for ban on pay and social dumping of immigrant and subcontracted foreign labour,  16.03.2002