An occasional series of stories from little-covered Scandinavian countries. It's been the Finnish presidency of EU for six months - and the climax of this period is the bi-annual summit of European leaders due to take place on Friday. I will try to write about it then: one of the key issues will be the Turkish membership question, which is on the rails, a tug of war between member states who want to retard the process, and others that are impatient - one of which countries is Finland. With that in mind, until then, this little story catches my eye
EU legislation is one thing in theory; another thing, as everyone knows, in practice. So also with free labour mobility. On 1 May Finland – new holders of EU presidency - proudly joined a number of other member states, including Portugal, Greece and Spain in opening its borders to labour from the new member states. The UK, Sweden and Ireland opened their borders already in 2004.
So is it easy to get a job in Finland now? Not really, if the experiences of a Polish journalist from Wroclaw are anything to go by. Her newspaper sent reporters to all the capitals that had opened their borders, to pose as ordinary job applicants. The Lisbon, Athens, London, Stockholm and Barcelona bound hacks had all found menial jobs within a week.
The girl who drew the Helsinki lot was less lucky.
“You can’t even get a job as a cleaner without some knowledge of Finnish. It was told that measuring and mixing cleaning fluid was so demanding English is not enough, even though everyone spoke it,” Aleksandra “Ola” Pezda wrote afterwards, for Gazeta Wyborcza. “They don’t really want foreigners here.”
She was told that she was the wrong sex to get a job as a painter; though she might get a job handing out copies of metro later. At two employment agencies serving foreigners, Eures and Staffpoint, she was told that "nobody will accept an application form" if she does not speak Finnish, Europe’s most complicated and most obscure language. She went around restaurants, called about available jobs and went to St Henry’s Catholic church. In other cities these have “Wailing Wall” noticeboards for jobs, usually for the Polish community. In the Helsinki church the only notice was for alcoholics anonymous. Pezda was astonished to see the largest trade union headquarters she had seen anywhere and speculated whether this was the cause of the Finns’ hostility to foreigners. She was surprised the Finns wanted so much personal information by email, unlike other cities. “They are afraid to say no to your face,” she was told.
She found Helsinki extremely expensive; and one Pole she did meet was only ever able to send back 500 euros a month. Even student restaurants were unaffordable and she learnt to bake her own bread. People knew the prices of everything down to the last cent. Finally she did find a woman called Ritta who apologised for the application forms being only in Finnish – the first Finn to do so. Pezda went out into the street and hailed a Finn at who random, who could help her through the labyrinthine application. However she never got to know if she was given the job, since she had to catch her plane back home, and the manager had said “I will see you later, maybe in a few weeks.” My thought about this: if the Finns have made Enlargement the principal theme of their presidency, it could be because they do not fear it.
