A Country with a Difference

BY STIG JUTTERSTRÖM Liisa Kirveskari is standing in front of the still beautiful, old brick building which once housed the Åström brothers' leather factory in Oulu, Finland, 600 km north of the capital Helsinki. The building is no longer a factory, having been transformed into a catering school. "This is where I retrained as a waitress, after I had become an unemployed welder," Liisa told us. The Åström brothers came to Finland from Tornedalen, north of the polar circle in Sweden. They started their leather goods factory in the middle of the 18th century, making shoes, harnesses and saddles, mainly for Russian horsemen. The Åströms became the largest employers in Oulu, with ten per cent of the town's workforce. Oulu also had at that time the most important tar producer in the world. Now both leather and tar have fled the town, and Oulu has instead become the electronics capital of Finland. It also has the largest concentration of restaurants. Unions are strong, despite the fact that modern IT companies - which normally are not well unionised - have replaced heavy industry. BRUTAL RECESSION Liisa Kirveskari's career in catering was short, after her retraining course at the former Åström factory premises. "I was a welder for twelve years," she told us. The recession that started in the early 1990s was brutal to an extent never previously known in Finnish and European history. Two-thirds of the workforce in the construction company where she worked were dismissed. From 1990 to 1992, unemployment in Finland increased from 3.5 per cent to 20 per cent, a total of 500,000 people. The country was not only struck by the same recession as the rest of the industrialised world, but in addition its trade with the former Soviet Union, which accounted for 20 per cent to 25 per cent of total exports, ceased overnight when the communist empire collapsed. Liisa was unemployed for three months, finding only temporary jobs as a cleaner, hospital auxiliary and waitress. EMPLOYERS DICTATED CONDITIONS When the restaurant market was at its height in the mid-1990s, topless waitresses made their first appearance in a Finnish restaurant - in Oulu. Labour market conditions were entirely dictated by employers. Those offered jobs dared not refuse, although the conditions were loathsome; either you accepted the conditions offered, or you had to try elsewhere. "I got fed up with these short-term jobs and in 1994 managed to find a permanent job in electronics, as an assembly-line worker at Nokia," she said. This former welder from a heavy industry with proud trade union traditions found that interest in unions was far too weak in the youthful electronics industry in which women workers predominated. "The women didn't dare defend their interests. Since I couldn't keep my mouth shut, I found that, within a year, I was elected chair of the union branch with 650 members." Liisa's union career did not stop at that point. She was elected chair of the Nokia Group national trade union committee in Finland, to which all blue- and white-collar workers and all professional engineers belong. In 1999, she became the first woman regional officer of the Finnish Metalworkers' Union, with the whole of Oulu county (the same geographical size as Switzerland or Belgium) as her responsibility. THE OLDEST NORDIC HIGH-TECH COMMUNITY Things started improving in 1994, not only for Liisa Kirveskari, but also for the whole of Finland, which began to climb out of the unprecedented slump. Nokia, the former manufacturer of car tires and rubber boots, became not only a world famous trademark for entirely different products and but also the largest European company quoted on the stock exchange. Oulu was transformed from a town relying on heavy industry with tall factory chimneys to a centre for electronics research and production. It has now become the Finnish Silicon Valley. Three leading groups in Oulu work together pragmatically - the town's politicians, the management of the newly-established university and a number of small entrepreneurs - which led in 1982 to the establishment in a former dairy of a high-tech centre called Technopolis. There are today 5,000 people working at what has now become the oldest Nordic technology centre. The town currently has over 10,000 people employed in the IT and electronics sector. A REGIONAL MAGNET Oulu has become an employment magnet, attracting people from the surrounding region, from the west coast of the Gulf of Bothnia to the border with Russia in the east. The population increased by 3,000 every year during the whole of the '90s and now stands at over 120,000. The university, built to resemble a large industrial complex, caters to 13,000 students. Research centres have also been created for medical and biotechnical research, financed by private and public money. But the technical faculty still remains by far the largest. Nokia has endowed a professorial Chair. One of the secrets behind the development of Oulu is that the town has managed to attract well-educated young people from the whole of northern Finland. But none of this would have been possible without the "Oulu spirit", the broad desire to build a modern industrial environment. THE SMALL-TOWN SPIRIT REMAINS One result of this spirit is the Nokia Network, located some 7 km outside the town centre. The company consists of three glass and concrete buildings. The first dates from the 1970s, but extensions have been added in a number of phases during the 1990s. In a decade, the workforce has increased from 300 to over 1,000 people, of whom 685 are blue-collar and 350 white-collar workers. The average age is 32 for men and 40 for women. Pirjo Käyhkö joined Nokia in 1994 after working as a cleaner in the building industry for nearly ten years. Two years later, she became active in the union and is now deputy to the chief safety representative. She works a three-shift system as a checker. "We have no problems recruiting youngsters," she tells us. "We have a special branch for young people and organise specific activities to get them committed to the union. Young people are good at expressing themselves and enjoy influencing decisions. More than half the branch officers are less than 35 years old. We are very pleased about it." Pirjo was born in Oulu and thinks that some of the changes have been too fast. "Too much has been pulled down," she says. But the small-town spirit remains. It is true that some buildings disappeared in the '60s and '70s, but enough remains to make it possible to walk around on cobbled pedestrian streets surrounded by lovely three-story houses built of wood or stone. HALF ARE UNDER THE AGE OF 35 "It is exciting living in Oulu with all these new people moving here," says Kati Kurvinen. She has been working for seven years at the PKC Group, which manufactures cables for the car industry, chiefly for Sweden. Half of the 500 people employed at the factory in Oulu are under the age of 35 years. There is also a growing demand from the heavy vehicle industry and the number of employees is increasing. Future prospects look bright. Kati is very happy with her work at the end of the production line. Her work is independent, working hours on the dayshift are flexible, and she earns the average hourly wage for Finnish women metalworkers of 10 to 11 euros. Although not active, she appreciates the benefits her union membership offers. Petrol is a few cents cheaper with the union card, and she joins in on sea cruises organised by her local union branch. 12,000 NEW MEMBERS EVERY YEAR The number of members in the Finnish Metalworkers' Union has increased from 150,000 in 1992 to over 170,000 ten years later. Each year it acquired 11,000 to 12,000 new members, an annual net increase of 2,000 to 3,000. The level of unionisation varies from one sector to another and averages 90 per cent. It is at its lowest in small companies, in the IT sector and in the area surrounding the capital Helsinki. When it comes to developments in Finland's Metalworkers' Union, the country seems totally different. Whereas in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and France the number of union members has decreased during the last decade, in Finland the growth of the Metalworkers' Union members has been robust. This is particularly true of young members. More than half - 6,421 out of 11,229 new members in 1991 - were under the age of 25. Erkki Vuorenmaa, the union's president, explains that these developments are due to a long and deliberate campaign to target young people. He, himself, was originally employed fulltime - at the age of 27 - at the union national level as youth officer, between 1976 and 1982. THE UNION IS POPULAR "We have extensive activities for young members in 100 of our 300 branches, with a solid trade union content," says Vuorenmaa. "We provide information about the union and recruit at vocational training colleges. We organise union camps for youngsters every year with 6,000-7,000 participants." He notes with satisfaction that the Metalworkers' Union is popular. "Opinion polls show that the trade union movement is regularly in the third place in terms of public respect for Finnish organisations. Only the church and the police beat us on that count." "The reason is because we have become a social movement," says Vuorenmaa. "The union must never become only an insurance company or a group of specialists." A TIME OF CRISIS How come that the Finnish Metalworkers' Union has expanded, especially in the light of what has happened to unions in neighbouring countries? Vuorenmaa's answer is that the 1990s were an extremely difficult period, with - at its peak - half a million unemployed in this country of 5 million inhabitants. "Every second member was unemployed at some time during that period. Between 1991 and 1995 we had a purely right-wing government, with a finance minister who believed that workers really should not join unions. He thought it better for them to join the union's unemployment benefit scheme. There was a very strained relationship between the government and the trade union movement." Vuorenmaa believes that, as a result, union members had a rude awakening and started becoming more ideologically aware. They reacted against the government's anti-union policies. And, since 1995, the Finnish government has been led by the Social Democrats, currently described as a rainbow coalition with representatives of the conservative Union Party, as well as the former Communists and the Greens. Although anti-union sentiments remain in some places, no one dares challenge the unions as they did in the early 1990s. REPERCUSSIONS ARE STILL FELT The political changes, combined with the Nokia-led export boom and a restrictive wages policy within the framework of what became known as "a comprehensive national solution," paved the way for increased employment in the country, and with it the growth of membership in the Metalworkers' Union. "Oulu has been the case in point of this development," says Erkki Vuorenmaa. But it doesn't mean that everything in the garden is rosy, not even in Oulu. The industrial crisis and cutbacks in the service sector have left their mark. Average unemployment in the country still hovers at around 10 per cent. In Oulu it is around 14 per cent, and one Finn in three is still long-term unemployed. "The repercussions of the painful crisis of the 90s are still distressing," says Liisa Kirveskari. She knows that much remains to be done.