Hallitusohjelmakirjauksen tavoitteena on madaltaa etenkin pienten ja keskisuurten yritysten työllistämiskynnystä. Lainmuutos koskee ihan kaikkia työnantajia koosta ja sektorista riippumatta.
One of the aims of the Government Programme is to make it easier to hire new employees, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. The proposed legislative amendment intended to achieve this applies to all employers, regardless of size or sector.
Fixed-term employment contracts are more prevalent in Finland than many other EU countries. The share of fixed-term employees is significantly higher in the public sector (24.8%) than in the private sector (13%). Fixed-term employment contracts are significantly more common among women than men and particularly common among younger age groups. The number of fixed-term employees in the public sector is 163,000. This is information can be found right in the Government’s own proposal.
Cities, municipalities and wellbeing services counties already make huge numbers of fixed-term employment contracts, accounting for a quarter of their employees. Many of these contracts are also illegal. They are used to cover a permanent need for substitute labour, and in the social welfare and health care sector and the early childhood education sector, it is common practice for employers to string together consecutive fixed-term employment contracts. In spite of this, the Government is proposing an amendment that will make it even easier for Finland's largest public-sector employers in the social welfare and health care sector to use fixed-term employees or even encourage them to switch to using fixed-term employees.
A reserve of fixed-term employees
The Finnish Government has no understanding of, nor any desire to understand, the working life of Tehy members. We still remember the grotesque half bananas, printed thank you cards and blue lights of Finlandia Hall that were supposed to serve as recompense for the nurses who went above and beyond during the COVID-19 pandemic, even at the expense of their own health.
The work performed by Tehy members is vital – literally. Their every absence from work must be covered by finding a suitable substitute. This results in a massive system of substitutions and a reserve of fixed-term employees, all run by the employer. By contrast, in the private sector many office workers or remote workers can be absent from work without any need for a substitute or, in some cases, without anyone even noticing their absence. When you have no need for fixed-term employees, the legislative amendment also does not matter to you and you can give it your full support.
It is clear that deregulating the use of fixed-term employment contracts will make the already large pool of fixed-term employees in the public sector even larger. However, the Government's proposal does not recognise this obvious consequence at all. Large employers will not pass up the opportunity to exploit the amendment when the alternative is making a fixed-term contract for a justified reason, which can be illegal and even lead to compensation for the employee – at least if they have the backing of a trade union.
Making employees compete for contracts
The legislative amendment will result in employers testing new social welfare and health care professionals with one-year fixed-term employment contracts, even for permanent positions. Only after passing this one-year period will a new employee be able to reach the level required by current legislation and be eligible for a fixed-term employment contract made “for a justified reason” and, perhaps eventually, a permanent employment contract. Those forced to get by on consecutive fixed-term contacts will see their strings of fixed-term contracts grow even longer. And all this time, employers will be able to make their employees compete for contracts, with only the most desirable ones earning a new employment contract. Even the Government itself justifies the proposed amendment as a so-called extended probationary period, saying that the amendment will increase employers’ chances of selecting employees who have already worked for them in the past and who the employer has found to be good and reliable.
The proposal includes a promise that the legislation will ensure that the amendment does not lead to the unjustified use of consecutive fixed-term contracts. This promise is an utter sham, as the amendment does not include any concrete means of ensuring this. It rings just as hollow as the Government Programme’s claim that more effective measures will be targeted at preventing discrimination based on pregnancy leave and family leave.
Discrimination will increase in two ways
How will the legislative amendment increase discrimination? Fixed-term employment contracts are particularly prevalent among young women. The legislative amendment will make it easier for employers to simply not offer a new contract to fixed-term employees who give notice of their pregnancy, as employers will no longer be required to justify doing so. Instead, they can simply choose a new employee who is not going on pregnancy leave.
A second and entirely new form of discrimination takes place when a mother is absent from work for at least two years due to caring for their child at home or going on pregnancy leave again without returning to work. When the draft proposal was circulated for comment in the summer, it still included a five-year time limit, which has since been reduced to two years. It would seem that the legislators quietly shook hands with the lobbyists of the Confederation of Finnish Industries and Suomen yrittäjät to make this happen, but in doing so also managed to create a new form of sanctioned discrimination.
In future, an employee who has already been discriminated against for going on family leave by being denied a new employment contact will be “rewarded” for birthing a future taxpayer by being considered a new employee when at least two years have passed since the end of their employment relationship at the start of their new fixed-term employment contract. This means that the employer can apply a new one-year quota of fixed-term employment contracts on the employee without any justification, even for work of a completely permanent nature – and use this one-year period to monitor whether being the mother of a small child causes absences from work, for example. This long period of scrutiny is certainly an unnecessary and additional burden for a parent of a small child.
With the new, short two-year time limit, an employee’s status can be reset to that of a new employee. With this change, Government ensures that employers have a whole new motive to terminate the employment contracts of those who have given notice of family leave as soon as possible in order to start their fixed-term timer. In criminal law, there is a prohibition on double jeopardy, i.e. the same act cannot be punished twice. In future working life, this prohibition will no longer apply to a fixed-term employee who takes family leave – they will be sanctioned twice for doing so.
And this is despite the fact that the birth rate in Finland has plummeted and all means to support family formation should be put in place as a matter of urgency. However, the Government proposal downplays the issue by saying that “the impact can be considered limited, however, as it has been studied to affect mainly women and the amendment is estimated to affect only a few thousand women of childbearing age who would be employed under a fixed-term contract without a justified reason”. The Government's harsh attitude is particularly harsh on Tehy members, as a large proportion of these “only a few thousand” are public-sector social welfare and health care professionals.
No impact on employment
And the cherry on top is that the legislative amendment will not even improve employment in SMEs, even though that is the justification put forth for it. The draft act clearly states that “it cannot be concluded in the light of existing data that this legislative amendment will increase employment in Finland”. In other words, the Government deliberately wants to weaken the position of employees and increase job insecurity and discrimination based on pregnancy leave, and yet in the same breath downplays its impact on the basis of only affecting young women of childbearing age.
I call for the title of the Government Programme of Prime Minister Orpo’s Government to be changed from “A strong and committed Finland” to “A Finland only committed to the strong”.
