Finland: unions divided on the introduction of minimum wage

Debate is open. Mikko Mäenpää, leader of the STTK confederation (white collars), which mostly represents executives in the public and in the private sector, said that Mr. Lyly’s proposition is a bad idea, even though it seems interesting at first. He says that wage negotiations imply assessing productivity, used to determine the part of profit the employee should get. “This means that the social partners should be able to evaluate a fair pay level linked to the market, and therefore determine minimum wage. Those who do not believe in that do not believe in the labor market system as a whole.” He also pointed that, as far as workers are concerned, STTK members already spoke on that issue, allowing their representatives to vote for them. In addition, he doesn’t think that low wages can be increased without updating the entire wage grid. “If you look at international standards, our minimum wage doesn’t have the lowest rate – far from it. On the contrary, the wage levels of several categories of graduates remain undeniably low.” Therefore, it is important to recognize that, if the lowest wages are increased, average and high wages should be increased as well. However, he acknowledged that “top managers’ earnings have reached levels that are really far from what other employees are subject to. In that case, there is no more proportionality,” when managers say that wage levels should be defined according to working requirements. He says that this proportionality isn’t relevant considering the gap between the wages of an ordinary employee and the CEO of a large business.