Trade Union News from Finland
Tekijä (17.04.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) In smaller enterprises, employment security is on the wane. The Orpo-Purra Government is abolishing the obligations set out in the act on Co-operation within Undertakings for companies with less than 50 employees. This means that a greater number of employees will end up without the built-in security guaranteed under this law.
One of the expressed goals of the right-wing Government is to improve the prerequisites for the operation of small and medium-size undertakings. Paradoxically, the new legislation might have the opposite impact.
Jenniveera Tabell, a lawyer for the Industrial Union, says in an interview for this magazine (in Finnish, see page 8), that the situation of smaller companies will not improve for the better due to the new legislation. On the contrary, in some cases it might even turn out worse if employees looking for better employment security opt to work for bigger companies.
Tekijä (17.04.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The act on Co-operation within Undertakings stipulates the employer must give relevant information to employees. It regulates obligatory cooperation negotiations with employees in any situation where their position or work will undergo changes, like redundancies.
The law states when the employer must begin negotiations, how to proceed and for how long the negotiations must take.
The employer must follow the law carefully and employees shall be heard. If this does not happen, the law includes sanctions for employers. Without obligatory negotiations, the employer can quite freely present motivations for changes and redundancies as employees do not have the relevant information concerning the company’s true financial situation.
Tekijä (20.03.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The Orpo-Purra Government’s drastic cuts in Finnish unemployment security endanger the existing system of temporary lay-offs. In international comparison, this system is seen as something positive and working well.
The employer can lay off an employee temporarily, based on the rules stipulated in the Finnish law, either for a fixed-term period or until further notice. This can happen by reducing working hours or interrupting the work completely.
Even when payment of wage or salary is stopped, the employment relationship remains in effect in other respects. For the loss in pay, an employee can get earnings-related allowance for the period of the lay-off. For Industrial Union members, this is paid by the A-kassa unemployment fund.
Tekijä (20.03.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The Orpo-Purra Government is introducing deep cuts to earnings-related unemployment security.
It will cut the earnings-related unemployment allowance, make it more difficult to get it and freeze the index increases. The changes will concern the unemployed, those temporarily laid-off and part-time workers.
Some of the cuts are already in place. From the beginning of this year, the waiting period for unemployment benefits has been raised from five to seven days.
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