Full Coverage: Finland

05.09.2007 According to a new opinion survey, Finns would rather have five more days off annually than to receive a two per cent pay rise.

30.05.2007 Eduskuntavaalit on käyty ja uudet kansanedustajat ovat aloittaneet työnsä. Vaalikampanjoissa luvatut asiat olisi nyt lunastettava. Mutta miten? Kansanedustajien mukaan yksittäisen edustajan tärkein eduskunnassa vaikuttamisen paikka on valiokuntatyö.

23.02.2007 Finland’s parliamentary elections will be held on March 18. There are almost 200,000 people with foreign backgrounds living in Finland – but still not a single immigrant representative in the Parliament.

29.01.2007 In September 2006, the forest industry giant UPM, based in Finland, announced its plan to get rid of its remaining 300 forestry workers. They and their union, the Wood and Allied Workers' Union, rejected the plan arguing that it is bad for both the company and its forests, let alone the workers themselves.

26.01.2007 Once viewed as an expensive idea hatched by nutty environmentalists, recycling is now mainstream economic activity. But despite extensive recycling schemes, the average Finn produces about 500 kilos of waste every year and the planet still seems to be going down the tubes. So is the current emphasis on household recycling a case of too little, too late?

16.01.2007 In 2003 Finnish police registered 910 work place accidents. But this figure is only a fraction of the number of work place accidents registered by Statistics Finland, which recorded up to over 100,000 work place accidents. A sixth of the 910 cases registered by police ended up at the discretion of prosecutors.

08.01.2007 Just before Christmas, at the Fur Centre in Vantaa, close to Helsinki, animal rights' activists targeted not only potential customers (which is fairly normal) but this time also Fur Centre employees. Activists photographed employees and their car number-plates or registration numbers. Employees were also verbally abused on their way into work.

03.01.2007 Finnish legislation does not offer much protection to agency hired labour. Moreover, the handful of agreements with regard to agency hired labour, which have been hammered out by labour market parties, often leave agency hired labour bereft of the benefits which are usually enjoyed by employees with regular jobs.

29.12.2006 Efforts to develop cooperation between six industrial trade unions have advanced to a new phase. In mid- December the unions chose SAK’s bargaining department head, Lauri Lyly, to examine the options for future relations between the six unions. The main alternatives lie between a full merger and closer cooperation.

06.12.2006 MSB, a company based in Gdansk in Northern Poland, is seriously in breech of labour legislation rules in regard to its work sites in Finland in what amounts to dumping working conditions. Polish electricians have been paid only 5 hours per hour, a third of the hourly rate laid down by the Finnish collective agreement.

06.12.2006 Ann Selin, president of the Service Union United, is not satisfied with the government's goal in narrowing the pay gap between women and men. In 2004, the average pay for women was 80 per cent of the average pay for men making the gap even wider than it was in 1999.

30.11.2006 Finnish human rights groups say that European Union leaders failed to raise human violations in Russia effectively enough at their meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin here last week.

12.07.2006 Generally speaking, we can say that in Finland, no narrowing of the gap between women's and men's pay has taken place in a long time. The average wage and salary for women is still only about 80 per cent of that for men, despite numerous efforts, undertakings and agreements to tackle the gap problem.

27.04.2006 As of May 1 this year Finland will no longer restrict the free movement of labour from the new Member States of the EU.
In Finland, the past two years of restricted entry rights have been put to good use by allowing time for control mechanisms against the grey economy and abuse of foreign labour to be put firmly in place.

04.02.2006 WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb 4 (OneWorld) - Water, water everywhere and we are duped into buying it bottled.

24.01.2006 Britain is ranked fifth best in the world at tackling domestic and global environmental problems - behind New Zealand, Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic - in performance league tables to be launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

02.12.2005 Finland's Minister of Justice Leena Luhtanen recently stated that one solution to ease the situation in overcrowded Finnish prisons is to return foreign prisoners to their home countries, especially Estonian and Russian prisoners. The Finnish League for Human Rights is worried about possible human rights violations in the prisons of the return countries.

28.10.2005 Recently the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE announced a NATO Gallup that enraged both supporters of democracy and opponents of NATO. It also raised criticism in the media for the way it was conducted. In this inquiry, the majority of Finns had said no to NATO, but then they were asked whether they would support the countries’ leaders in case they decide to join it, and most had said yes. The result was broadcast as, “The Majority of Finns would support political leaders if they decided to join NATO”.

30.08.2005 The Helsinki Conference, 7-9 September 2005 is the culmination of the Helsinki Process. It is a multi-stakeholder dialogue and networking event for addressing the challenge of making ambitious targets of the world community a reality. 400 representatives of civil society, government, the corporate sector, academia and media are invited to come together to build commitment for the implementation of needed steps towards a safer, more just and democratic world.

18.08.2005 As part of The Great Volga River Route project, an International Workshop on Sustainable Development and World Heritage took place on 28-31 July 2005 in Bucharest, Romania.The aim is to link young people through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and engage them in the preservation and promotion of World Heritage and Biosphere sites.