Helsinki (22.11.2003 - Juhani Artto) Finland is tightening its measures to control the abuse of migrant labour. This is largely due to the demands made in recent years by the trade union movement. The movement has fought for reforms that will help to prevent the creation and growth of a grey labour market. Many responsible employers have also echoed the calls to combat migrant labour abuse in the form of substandard working conditions and denial to workers of even the most elementary rights. Law-abiding employers regard such abuse as unfair competition that impairs the competitiveness of their own businesses.
Cases of abuse have so far mainly been exposed in the construction, hotel and catering industries, but cases have also occurred in several other industries, such as road haulage, engineering workshops and harbours. Most of the abused workers have been either Estonians or Russians. These two nationalities also form the largest groups in the legal migrant labour force.
Recently more evidence has been discovered of the major role of organised crime in grey labour market operations. "It is mostly the same criminal organisations that run the illegal narcotics and prostitution business that are involved in illegal migrant labour," commented Matti Viialainen, Deputy Director of the Finnish trade union confederation SAK at a seminar on economic crime held in early November. In a recent study authorities estimate that the number of workers brought into the Finnish labour market by criminal organisations has reached the thousands.
Information about the involvement of criminals in the grey labour market has also alarmed policymakers. In consequence a major boost in supervision of illegal migrant labour will soon be implemented. The government of Prime Minister Matti Vanhala is establishing a new project unit for five years to tighten supervision and improve co-operation between various public authorities. The project will be based at the Ministry of the Interior with a planned full-time staff of 36. Their function will be to implement supervisory measures in enterprises and work sites using migrant labour.
One fundamentally new aspect will be close co-operation between the project unit and all other public agencies concerned. These will include the taxation, employment, frontier guard, police and immigration authorities.
Even this, however, will not suffice to prevent social dumping, SAK argues. The organisation insists that employers paying substandard wages and salaries must be penalised. At a recent seminar Markus Äijälä, an official at the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers rejected this proposal out of hand. He was also opposed to a trade union movement proposal to make the principal contractor liable for ensuring that its subcontractors comply with the applicable collective agreements and legislation.
Experts also suggest that Finland should exercise its right to tax labour hired from abroad. This would give the taxation authorities vital information about foreign enterprises and labour working in Finland. The taxation authorities of Finland and Estonia should tighten their co-operation in hunting down lawbreaking enterprises and illegal labour traffickers.
The trade unions are insisting that all of these steps must be taken before 1 May 2004, when Estonia and nine other countries are due to accede to the European Union.
Daryl Taylor adds:
The idea that Finland's public authorities should help to prevent migrant labour abuse was stressed to the competent authorities by my own trade union section way back in 1988, but for many years the Finnish administration has seemed quite unable to view this matter with any seriousness. To give a simple example, it is still commonplace for the contracts of employment of newly-arrived migrant workers to be made for a fixed period without the justified reason required by the Employment Contracts Act.
This means that these contracts of employment are not lawful, and so the authorities should not issue work permits in these cases. However, not only are work permits standardly issued in such cases, but the rights of the migrant worker concerned are actually curtailed by the authority on the grounds that the employment is temporary! This may fairly be characterised not merely as allowing, but as actually colluding with migrant labour abuse.
When challenged last year in a particularly gross, but by no means unique case of this kind involving a Hungarian nursery school teacher, the work permit authority for Helsinki argued that it did not have the time to investigate whether the employment contract was lawful, and that it was the business of the worker concerned to find and approach the regional labour protection authority herself. This high-handed, buck-passing advice is, of course, quite useless to a job applicant in Budapest.
Such attitudes on the part of public authorities do not bode well for the success prospects of the new project at the Ministry of the Interior. The sharp-eyed reader may also have noticed that there are no plans to involve migrant workers or their organisations in the work of this project.
To anyone not versed in the traditional mechanism of public administration in Finland this may seem odd, as the quickest, most reliable, and above all cheapest way to find out about a migrant community and its members is to gain the trust of that community. Time will tell how successfully these officials succeed in supervising the labour market from a room with no windows.