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Helsinki (18.09.2003 - Eeva Simola) Finnish engine manufacturer Wartsila Ltd is caught up in Sweden's largest ever bribery prosecution, local dailies report. According to the public prosecutor, "it is clear that Wartsila offered bribes to secure orders". Wartsila admits the payments but says these were for consulting services. Finland's public prosecutor is now considering the case.

The Swedish shipping line Rederi AB Gotland operates ferries between Gotland island and mainland Sweden. This company recently commissioned two superfast ferries from a Chinese shipyard. Wartsila supplied a total of eight main engines and six auxiliary engines for these vessels, together with propellers for one of them. The orders totalled EUR 25-30 million. The M/S Visby began operating this year.

Wartsila concluded two brokerage agreements with Euro Marine Ltd. This company was represented and partly owned by the main suspect in the corruption case, Bo Pettersson, who served as Technical Director at the shipping company. Wartsila paid some EUR 1.1 million in two instalments in 2000 and 2001 to Pettersson's private Swiss bank account.

Helsinki (11.09.2003 - Juhani Artto) About 4,000 people work in Finnish laundries, but many of these jobs are now under threat. The low wages in Estonia, which is just across the Gulf of Finland and only a few hours sailing from Helsinki, pose a difficult challenge to Finnish workers.

Recently one of the biggest users of laundry services, the Silja Line passenger ferry company, relocated its laundry services from Finland to the Estonian capital Tallinn. This followed a successful tender from the Granlund laundry service. Dozens of jobs may be lost in Finland because of this.

In autumn several large hotel chains will negotiate new laundry service contracts. Finnish workers now fear the loss of more work to competitors in Estonia. Some of these competitors are subsidiaries of enterprises based in Finland.

Helsinki (04.09.2003 - Juhani Artto) The proportion of part-time workers has slowly increased in Finland. Over the period from 1989 to 2002 it grew from 8.9 per cent of all wage and salary earners to 12.6 per cent. Among women the proportion increased from 12.6 per cent to 17.2 per cent, and among men from 5.2 per cent to 7.7 per cent.

Among women part-time work is more common in the private sector than in the public sector. One fifth of private sector female employees work part-time.

In commerce 33.4 per cent of female employees worked part-time in 2002. In the hotel and catering industry 32.7 per cent of women had a part-time job, while the corresponding figure for cleaning and other property maintenance services was 31.0 per cent. The corresponding figures for men were 9.7, 24.0 and 14.1 per cent.

Helsinki (28.08.2003 - Juhani Artto) June, July and August are the months in which working Finnish people spend most of their annual leave. Both in the late 1980s and the late 1990s 71 per cent of annual leave was spent during the three Summer months.

July is by far the most popular holiday month. Its share expanded from 40 per cent to 44 per cent in 1987-2000. June became less popular, falling from 18 per cent to 8 per cent over this period. At the same time August won favour as a holiday month. Its share increased from 13 per cent to 19 per cent.

The main reason for the changes in the June and August proportions has been the increasing internationalisation of business and other spheres of life. Finnish organisations and individuals have increasingly felt pressure to follow the holiday timing of Western European countries.

Helsinki (21.08.2003 - Daryl Taylor) Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the Lahti seminar weekend (read the Trunf report on it) was the choice of main theme. There is probably some truth in the cynical observation that Finland’s trade union mainstream has only taken an active interest in the welfare of immigrants since it became clear that many of these workers could not be kept out of the Finnish labour market following European Union enlargement, and would therefore be able to compete with Finns for jobs in Finland.

Thus we have the slightly paradoxical situation that Finland’s largest labour confederation SAK established an office in Tallinn, Estonia, to advise prospective migrants about their rights in the Finnish labour market while simultaneously seeking to negotiate transition periods impeding the mobility of labour from the new Member States. To their credit, however, Finland’s unions have now understood the point that it is important to recruit these newcomers into union membership as quickly as possible.

Helsinki (21.08.2003 - Juhani Artto) How are immigrants treated in the Finnish labour market? The size and character of Finland’s immigrant population has now reached the point at which it has become possible to draw a realistic and diversified picture of the labour market situation. Despite various well-meaning efforts to improve the status of immigrant labour over the last few years, the situation is generally poor. The picture painted by immigrants themselves is gloomier even than the Finns care to admit.

This was well illustrated at the weekend seminar of the Trade Union Solidarity Centre of Finland (SASK) in the southern Finnish city of Lahti in April. This event gathered some 600 union activists from all parts of the country and from all industries. One in ten of the participants were of foreign origin but living permanently in Finland.

While immigrant speakers at the seminar gave crushing testimony of both covert and open ethnic discrimination, the descriptions of their individual and collective struggle also gave cause for some optimism. Several speakers were also able to report successes in the fight against ethnic discrimination.

Helsinki (18.06.2003 - Juhani Artto) A new study indicates that distance working has only marginally reduced work-related traffic and the consequent burden on the environment. This conflicts with the expectations that were entertained when job structure changes and new technologies began to create conditions for distance working.

The study, based on interviews with 19,000 working people, exposes that in 2001 only about five per cent of those in work were engaged in distance working. Experts suggest that the potential for distance working is much larger than this, and could rise to as much as 40 per cent of all jobs.

This wide discrepancy between actual and potential distance working was not the most surprising discovery of the study, however. It was even more important to note that people engaged in distance working visited their workplaces at enterprises almost daily.

Helsinki (01.06.2003 - Juhana Vartiainen**) Before the March parliamentary elections in Finland political parties described their goals and presented their promises. Civil servants, researchers and central banks are often of the opinion that election promises are too generous and that "we cannot afford them". Yet it is striking to notice how much more grudging both promises and programmes have become in the last 10 to 15 years.

Until the 1980s the enlargement and construction of the welfare state was in full swing. New services were created, social security was expanded, pensions were increased and child allowances grew. Compared with these old good days, the entire welfare policy now looks rather anaemic and tight-fisted - and the political parties may seem quite similar as the differences between their reform demands are ultimately rather marginal.

What reasons lie behind this change towards a less generous policy? Many people believe that this is due to a process of "globalisation" that forces Finnish enterprises to compete in an international market so that "we can no longer afford" the welfare state that we used to have. However, it is self-deception to lay the blame on globalisation in this way. There is nothing new in globalisation: for a century welfare in Finland has been based on the country’s participation in the international division of labour.

Helsinki (19.05.2003 - Juhani Artto) Finland is one of a handful of countries where a large majority of wage and salary earners have joined trade unions. A new survey* published in February 2003 indicates that the organising rate in 2001 was over 70 per cent. Comparison with the previous survey reviewing the situation in 1994 sends a warning signal to the union movement, however. In seven years the organising rate has fallen by about 7 percentage points.

Over two million trade unionists in a nation of five million people

At the end of 2001 affiliates to the three central trade union confederations had a total of 2,082,265 rank and file members. The Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions - SAK (25 unions) had 51.1 per cent of these, while the Finnish Confederation of Salaried Employees – STTK (22 unions) had 29.4 per cent and the Confederation of Unions for Academic Professionals in Finland – Akava (33 unions) had 19.5 per cent.

Helsinki (04.05.2003 - Juhani Artto) Nokia Networks, the infrastructure arm of Nokia Plc, announced in April that it plans to cut 1,100 jobs in Finland. The reductions will occur in R&D, operations, sales, marketing and support functions. The goal is to reduce costs, improve profitability and strengthen the company’s position in the mobile infrastructure business.

Finnish Metalworkers Union President Erkki Vuorenmaa says that the move demonstrates a mismatch between Nokia’s declared values and its concrete behaviour. Vuorenmaa points out that the enterprise argument for extensive job reductions and redundancies rests purely on improving profitability, which means meeting shareholder expectations.

In the course of codetermination negotiations on the proposed measure Vuorenmaa is calling for Nokia’s leadership to consider what is most important to the enterprise: maintaining the highest possible profit margin or retaining skilled and able employees in preparation for the coming high business cycle.