Archive

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.

Helsinki (13.02.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) A bitter struggle has been going on for years over a collective agreement for those employed distributing unaddressed mail and free-sheet newspapers. From the end of 2009 there has been a collective agreement in place with a generally binding character. The Finnish Post and Logistics Union PAU is a party to this agreement.

The agreement has been endorsed in several court cases. Many of those employed by the distribution companies have received compensation for salaries deemed to be too low.

As a counter measure the employers decided to register their own so-called trade union Suomen Mainosjakajien Etujärjestö SME in November 2009.

Various leaders of the distribution companies have been on the board of SME. Currently, Research and GIS Specialist of the Janton Corporation, Olli-Pekka Sinkko is a board member. The former deputy CEO Mikko Kärki from Janton-owned Jakelujuniorit is the previous chair of the SME.

Helsinki (06.02.2014 - Heikki Jokinen) All together 60 municipalities had last year mandatory consultation with regard to possible personnel cuts with their personnel representatives. More than 300 person lost their job and some 7 200 people were on temporary lay-off. The average length of it was 13 days.

The figures are collected by JHL, the Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors, and based on the information received from the union activists around the country. In most of the municipalities the consultations concerned the whole personnel. Only in three municipalities negotiations were focused on a specific sector.