Archive

(28.06.1998 - Juhani Artto) A clear majority of members of unions affiliated to the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions - SAK - are satisfied with their working hours. This is one of the main conclusions of a study conducted in Spring 1998. The study forms part of a "Gender and Flexibility" project in which SAK is involved together with the British TUC and Dutch FNV organisations.

The investigation shows that regular Monday to Friday day work is still the norm. 78 per cent of the respondents are in regular full-time employment and 6 per cent are in regular part-time work. The proportion of those in temporary jobs was 14 per cent, of whom just over 70 per cent were working full-time and the rest part-time. Other types of employment, including those who are called to work when needed, made up 2 per cent of the sample.

Three years ago the proportion of atypical jobs was 14 per cent. Now it is 22 per cent. There is a remarkable gender split. 31 per cent of working women are in atypical employment, while the figure is only 14 per cent for men. Moreover the proportion of atypical jobs for women is rising while for men it is falling.

Helsinki (21.06.1998 - Irmeli Palmu) The Estonian trade union movement is generally in favour of Estonian membership of the EU. Estonia is one of the six countries which recently began membership negotiations. The others are Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Cyprus.

Since 1995 Raivo Paavo, Chairman of the central trade union organisation EAKL, has been demanding a referendum on membership.

Estonia's trade union movement is struggling with many problems. Union membership is not popular, and only 10 - 20 per cent of employees have joined a union. Pay differentials are huge and it is more a rule than an exception for part of the wage or salary to be paid under the counter.

(20.06.1998) There are two central trade union organisations in Estonia. EAKL, which organises both workers and salaried employees, has about 80,000 members. Raivo Paavo has served as chairman of EAKL for the past six years. In 1995 he was elected a Member of Parliament.

TALO concentrates its organising efforts on salaried employees. It has some 50,000 members. TALO is chaired by Toivo Roosimaa.

Helsinki (15.06.1998) Hours of work have become gender-oriented in Europe. Women have shorter working hours than men and are more prepared to take advantage of parental and other long-term leaves of absence and job-sharing programmes.

How should we view this? Are part-time work and long leaves of absence a feminine way of enhancing the quality of life or are they a trap which marginalises women and cuts their earnings in the labour market?

The commentators take a strict view. In their opinion we should discontinue all options favouring part-time work and "career breaks" that undermine the work of women. This will leave a general reduction in working hours as a policy in line with the interests of women.

Helsinki (07.06.1998 - Juhani Artto) According to a new study, women's wages and salaries in the engineering industries are only 82 per cent of those of men. This figure comes as no surprise to experts, since roughly similar differences have previously been recorded in several industries in Finland and in other economically developed countries.

The study was conducted by Juhana Vartiainen, a researcher at the Labour Institute for Economic Research (http://www.labour.fi/). The statistical material, which Vartiainen describes as being of high quality, covers the years from 1990 to 1995.

But what are the reasons for this pay differential?

Helsinki (31.05.1998 - Juhani Artto) The Nordic countries are often - and with justification - presented as model countries with respect to equality of the sexes. Concrete results in this area, however, are far from ideal in the opinion of Riitta Partinen, the SAK Secretary of Equal Opportunity. In Finland, as in all other countries in the world, women are still discriminated against in working life, even though in the Nordic countries this occurs in forms which are more covert than elsewhere.

"In earlier decades we believed that inequality would disappear when legislation was balanced, when women got as much formal education as men and when the problem of arranging day-care for small children was overcome. In the 1990s, however, we have had to recognise that all of this is not enough", Partinen says.

"We have been forced to deepen our analysis of the reasons why the many important steps which have been taken to create the conditions for equality have left us with so few concrete results in working life."

(20.05.1998 - Kimmo Kiljunen) Productivity is rising steadily. Over the current century output per hour has increased 25-fold. We are achieving production targets more easily and rapidly than ever before. All of this is extending available leisure time.

This increased leisure time can be divided evenly, bringing benefits to each and every one of us, or it can be managed by forcing part of the labour force to discontinue working life. Ultimately this choice is a political one.

Historically, some of the productivity increase has been used to shorten hours of work. At the beginning of this century the average working year in Finland was about 3,000 hours. Now it is only 1,700 hours.

In Summer 1917 Finland became the first country in the world to approve legislation on the eight hour working day.

Helsinki (07.05.1998 - Juhani Artto) Finnish people are favourably disposed towards the trade union movement. Of the three central trade union confederations, the largest - SAK - is held in highest esteem with almost two-thirds of the population (64 per cent) saying that they appreciate this organisation "rather a lot" or better.

The two other central trade union confederations, STTK and Akava, also earn a high score with positive responses of 58 and 54 per cent respectively.

These results are from a recent opinion poll conducted for SAK by Gallup Finland. 1008 Finnish people over 15 years of age and living in various parts of the country were interviewed.

Contrary to the commonly held view, those under 35 years of age had the strongest faith in trade unions when asked which organisation or institution is the most effective force in combating unemployment. Union movement was the first choice of 53 per cent of everyone interviewed. Lower-paid salaried employees also clearly had a higher than average belief in the ability of the union movement to fight unemployment.

Helsinki (05.05.1998 - Juhani Artto) In Finland, as in several other industrialised countries, mergers are taking place in the union movement.

Four private service sector unions in Finland's largest central trade union organisation, SAK, have begun negotiations which will probably lead to their merger in 2001. The four unions currently represent some 212,000 commercial workers, employees in the hotel and catering industry, building caretakers, cleaners, industrial guards, travel agency employees and workers in a large number of smaller sectors. Almost two thirds of these belong to the Union of Commercial Employees.

Helsinki (04.05.1998 - Kimmo Kevätsalo) We have constructed our union activism in the Nordic countries on the basis of a labour sales monopoly. The unions have sought to gather all employees working in an industry into a common cartel in which an agreement is made on a minimum wage and then nobody works for wages below the minimum.

If somebody, an unemployed worker for example, tries to break the cartel, then the organised workers take action to resist this. Employers are aware of this and usually honour the conditions of the cartel, i.e. the minimum conditions set out in the collective agreement.

It is a condition of the viability of such a cartel that the employers and workforce remain within the area covered by the agreement. Normally this area is defined by international borders.