Helsinki (17.12.2022 - Heikki Jokinen) Since August 1997, Trade Union News from Finland has been publishing and distributing, in English, news concerning trade union work and working life in Finland. Now, unfortunately, this has come to an end: this is the last piece of news from us.
This news service is one of the oldest trade union news services on the web, and was started by journalist Juhani Artto. He continued this work until May 2013, when journalist Heikki Jokinen took it over. In 2023, he has to focus on other work and is no longer able to provide this service.
During the more than 25 years of activity, the number of news articles published has been about one thousand.
The service has been made possible thanks to the support of the Finnish trade union confederations and trade unions. In 2022, all three confederations and seven unions were among our sponsors. Some of them have been involved all along the way since 1997.
However, the service is conducted in accordance with strict journalistic criteria, by professional journalists and language editors, and it is editorially independent of the unions.
Both publishers, Juhani Artto and Heikki Jokinen, were active in their own trade union, the Union of Journalists in Finland. Artto served as a union board member and Jokinen as the union Vice President.
The news articles have been delivered globally to a number of readers by e-mail and also published on the web page Trade Union News from Finland and linked to Labourstart.org. Almost all news published is archived on our website.
Unions and confederations sponsoring the service often included our news features on their own web pages, offered links to this news, shared these with their international umbrella organisations or mailed it to their international contacts.
As a result, our news has been available in many connections and in many languages. Some pieces of our news have appeared for instance in German, French, Spanish and Hebrew, too.
In our own web page, the archived articles still continue their life. The most read articles have had up to 10,000 hits. The number of hits is still growing steadily, even for the older contributions. In fact, the website offers, in English, a comprehensive archive of Finnish trade union movement activities since 1997.
Over the years, we received a number of requests from abroad. Heikki Jokinen has been giving interviews to researchers from countries like Singapore, Britain, the USA and Germany and been replying to many requests for information from different continents.
Among those interested in further information there were even some representatives from foreign employers and companies, as well as bank analysts of major Finnish multinational companies.
One group of our readers are those immigrants living in Finland, who are not fluent in the national languages of the country, Finnish and Swedish.
We thank all those who sponsored us, our subscribers and readers. Without all of you, this 25 year adventure would not have been possible. Together we are stronger.
Read more:
Trade Union News from Finland turns 20 (27.09.2017)
Heikki Jokinen is the new publisher of Trade Union News from Finland (28.05.2013)
Trade Union News from Finland begins its 16th year in service of the union movement today Helsinki (15.08.2012)