Archive

JHL (16.04.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) After much debate and various proposals mooted the government parties and the opposition parties agreed at the end of March on the implementation of a comprehensive reform of social welfare and health care services in Finland.

All services are to be delivered by five regional providers. In each region there is one university hospital. Municipalities will still be responsible for services and paying for care.

JHL president Jarkko Eloranta sees the chosen model as being on the right track. "It is based on service providers which are big enough or proportionate to population demands. In any event the most important concern is to secure reliable and good quality services throughout the country as a whole."

Helsinki (15.04.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) Trade union confederations are demanding that work to improve a contractor's obligations and liability should continue. The confederations consider the new proposals concerning changes to the Act do not go far enough and are insufficiently effective.

The Act on the Contractor's Obligations and Liability when Work is Contracted Out has been in force since 2007. Now, the working group at the Ministry of Employment and the Economy has examined the need to revise the Act.

The Act stipulates that before entering into agreements with subcontractors and temporary work agencies, a contractor must ensure that the subcontractors and agencies are reliable and comply with terms of employment.

Working group representatives from the three confederations Akava, SAK and STTK included an additional resolution to the working group’s final draft which stresses that the proposed changes do not address nor will help in solving the problems of wage dumping.

Helsinki (02.04.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) Forestry and paper company Stora Enso has admitted that its joint venture in Pakistan is using child labour. Public debate following the exposure forced the company to remove one of their directors from his job.

Swedish media reported that suppliers for the Finnish-Swedish company, Stora Enso, are using children to collect waste paper from rubbish dumps in Pakistan. This paper is then used by the Stora Enso joint venture operation, Bulleh Shah Packaging.

Stora Enso has been operating in Pakistan since 2012, when it entered into a joint venture with the Pakistani company, Packages Ltd. Stora Enso owns 35 per cent of this joint venture.
The company knew back in 2012 that child labour was part of the supply chain, but chose to ignore claims to this effect.

JHL (26.03.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) Privatisation of fully state owned companies such as Destia and Altia is again under discussion. Such measures are being considered as a way to cut the state budget deficit. JHL vehemently opposes privatisation.

Destia is a major road and railway construction and maintenance company with a market share of some 60 per cent of road-building work in Finland. Altia is a wine and spirits company, which was a part of the state alcohol monopoly until 1999.

JHL has published a joint statement together with the Finnish Food Workers' Union SEL, rejecting any such proposals. The unions say that there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for privatisation that would stand up to close scrutiny.

JHL (26.03.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) JHL sees the compromise reached concerning the alternation leave system as a bad decision. This came about by way of three-party negotiations between trade union confederations, the employers' federation and the Finnish Government.

"The decision makes it more difficult to use alternation leave as it sets unreasonable limits on or to becoming a substitute", says Teija Asara-Laaksonen, Chief Executive Officer of JHL.

In the future it will only be permissible to employ a substitute who has been unemployed for at least 90 days during the last 14 months. At the moment there is no such time limit on the length of unemployment.

Helsinki (24.03.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) Foreign seasonal wild berry pickers should be employed properly, proposes rapporteur Markku Wallin who has examined the situation and the working conditions of thousands of wild berry pickers coming to Finland every year.

Mr. Wallin proposes that the berry pickers should get employment contracts from the companies buying their berries. Their work should be regulated as is any work in Finland. Another alternative would be to create separate legislation, but the rapporteur sees this as the least favourable option.

At the moment seasonal wild berry pickers are in a kind of legal limbo. Their legal status in unclear: they are not seen as being employees and nor are they considered to be self-employed. They work at their own risk. According to Finnish legislation picking wild berries in forests is a right to be enjoyed by everyone and is also exempt from taxation.

Helsinki (10.03.2014 – Heikki Jokinen) Finnish trade union confederations have opened a joint office and launched a campaign to get citizens to vote in the elections for the European Parliament in May. The target group is in particular trade union members.

”Our main job is to distribute basic information on the European Union and the upcoming elections and encourage people to vote”, says Hanna Kuntsi, who is working as the office director. ”The turnout in the last elections for the European Parliament five years ago was very low, only 40.3 per cent of Finns voted. Among  wage and salary earners the percentage was even lower.”

Helsinki (04.03.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) Serious disagreement over the future of the job alternation leave system continues. The Government and employers want stricter rules in place. But the trade unions remain strongly in favour of the existing system.

Job alternation leave is an arrangement whereby an employee and employer come to an agreement allowing the employee to take leave for an agreed time of between 90 and 359 days. The employee then gets an allowance that is 70 - 80 per cent of his/her estimated unemployment benefit.

The employer undertakes to hire a registered unemployed jobseeker for the duration of the employee’s absence. To be entitled to the allowance the employee must have worked for at least ten years, including a minimum of 13 months with the same employer.

JHL (27.02.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) JHL is the biggest trade union in Finland. At the end of 2013, JHL had a total of 237,359 members. A clear majority of these were female, 161,278. The other 76,081 were, of course, male.

The number of members diminished slightly last year, by 0.6 per cent or some 1,500 people. This was mainly due to an increase in the number of people retiring. JHL attracted 14,300 new members last year.

Helsinki (20.02.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) The vast majority of Finns think wage dumping should be criminalised. Astonishingly perhaps, 82 per cent of Finnish adults are of the opinion, one way or the other, that wage dumping should be criminalised, and that employers who knowingly pay wages which are below the collective agreement minimum, should be convicted of a crime and punished.

The differences between the various groups of those who replied were surprisingly small. Coincidentally, by the same figure of 82 per cent, people in managerial positions answered yes, and 65 per cent of entrepreneurs also answered in the affirmative. Unsurprisingly, 91 per cent of employees answered positively.