Archive

Tekijä (06.06.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) Nowadays, multilingual workplaces are becoming more and more prevalent in Finland. This is, of course, reflected in the Industrial Union membership.

The union wants to be better able to serve all of its members, and one way to do this is through better multilingual information.

At the end of May 2024, the Industrial Union published the app Teollisuusliiton Hermes. It provides updated information about working and living in Finland, for employees and employers.

Tekijä (06.06.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The Teollisuusliiton Hermes app is updated continuously. It collects key information on the Industrial Union collective agreements, services and membership benefits.

You can download the app, for free, at all main app stores.

The app is working not only in our two national languages Finnish and Swedish, but also in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Estonian, Romanian and Vietnamese. The Union website gives information in these nine languages.

Tekijä (15.05.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The planned changes in the local bargaining legislation will distort competition. In the worst case scenario, pay might drop by even tens of thousands of euros a year.

Foreign employers active in Finland could take advantage of the new legislation. In these companies, employees are usually not organised in the Industrial Union, and there might be high turnovers in staff also. Among such employees, knowledge of the Finnish legislation and collective agreements is probably pretty limited, too.

Tekijä (15.05.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) Finland’s right-wing government plans to change local bargaining by sidelining shop stewards and make it possible, in some cases, to cut pay.

Local bargaining encompasses company level agreements regarding terms of work. The collective agreements list several areas, where it is possible to agree on something differently than that written into the sector collective agreement. These can be issues like organising work shifts, fixing holidays, and deciding on measures that have some influence on pay.

This kind of flexibility is welcomed by both companies and employees. In the technology sector, local bargaining has been part of the union collective agreements since 1994.

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.

Tekijä (14.02.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) Unemployment security will undergo several changes this year. Unfortunately, not for the better, as the Orpo-Purra right-wing Government is determined to cut benefits and tighten conditions for receiving these.

One of the harshest changes doubles the time in work needed to get earnings-related unemployment allowance. For now, one needs to have 26 weeks (about six months) employment during the 28 months preceding unemployment.

From September this year, this employment condition will be extended from 6 to 12 months during these same 28 months. This means it will be much harder to be eligible for earnings-related unemployment benefits, just like the government parties intend it to be.

Tekijä (14.02.2024 - Heikki Jokinen) The changes in unemployment security means that seasonal workers must find other work outside their employment periods. Moreover, these changes make seasonal work even more unattractive.

- Even now the employers have problems finding employees. These branches do not attract too many Finns due to the seasonal nature of the work, generally heavy work and quite low pay, says Riikka Vasama, the Bargaining Specialist at the Industrial Union in her interview in Finnish for this magazine.

For example, in the agriculture and horticulture sector the share of foreign employees is high. The Industrial Union and the Federation of Agricultural Employers estimate that half of the people working in these branches have a foreign background.