Once an active unionist – always an active unionist

Gordon Roberts, a university lecturer, was an active unionist before he came to Finland in 1975, and is still active. He reminds us that the union is as good as its active members, and the employer is only as good as the union obliges it to be.

- The essential drive by universities towards recruiting internationally could put the principle of equal pay for equal work under threat. The union and its members must be vigilant, Roberts emphasizes.

In 1975, I arrived in Finland from the UK to take up a post as lecturer in the Languages Department at the Vaasa School of Economics. The historical perspective is interesting: Kekkonen was (truly) in power, and it was the year of the Helsinki Final Act, which consolidated Soviet World War 2 territorial gains in Eastern Europe; go back the same number of years, and the Winter War is just over.

At the time of my arrival, Finland was not particularly international: the first pizzeria (an obvious indicator of internationalisation) was opened around that time, and Vaasa was home to a mere handful of overseas citizens, all of whom were regular visitors to the police station where we had to report regularly. The university employed two people non-Finns.

My arrival was made easier with some practical help from close colleagues, the janitor and the charming secretary to the Vice-Chancellor. I was a curiosity, but the reception given was all very welcoming, warm and amateurish. Still today the reception is welcoming warm and sadly amateurish, with few universities having a professional in Human Resources with the task of easing the arrival of staff from overseas.

Finland is today a fully fledged member of the EU, immigration issues are high on the agenda, ethnic restaurants are on every street corner AND the Ministry of Education has internationalisation written into almost everything. How can we possibly know our true academic value without appearing on the Shanghai list, or without winning OECD approval? University funding can now be affected by factors such as the numbers of staff and students on international exchange programmes, though the number of permanent members of staff from abroad is ignored.

An attraction of Finland has been lost

Many Finnish university vacancies today attract applicants from abroad, and professors, researchers and lecturers are to be found in most departments of all universities. There seems to be an interest in Finnish universities, but why? There is little active recruitment of scholars from abroad, so the scholars tend to find Finland rather than Finland finding scholars. Many have been attracted to Finnish universities because the universities have been long immune to the follies of quantitative accountability that the mainstream OECD countries have inflicted upon higher education.

Most scholars would rather spend their working time on research and teaching, and they shy away from devoting hours of work to demonstrating productivity, accountability and quality. Sadly the Ministry and the universities have now embraced the Thatcherite philosophies that I fled from in the UK in the 1970’s. An attraction of Finland has been lost.

The salaries at Finnish universities are not competitive, and this is an issue that the brave new world of autonomous universities will have to address if they want to attract top international scholars. However, at the moment, Finland can still be tempting to accomplished scholars from the former Eastern bloc and from developing countries. Those universities and departments that are blessed with world class researchers of their own can also successfully attract talented staff from abroad too.

Yet to become world class, international institutions, Finnish universities will to have to embark upon more active recruiting policies, using networks, head-hunting techniques, inviting and tempting people. Persuasion techniques such as ‘Finland is nice’, or ‘we have a good team here’ are going to have to be given some form of back up, like attractive salaries. Attractive salaries should, but cannot be paid to everyone, and here lies a danger.

An active unionist

Working for the union allowed me insight into a positive feature of being employed by Finnish universities: the transparency of the pay system. Before coming to Finland, I had been an active unionist, and so immediately upon arriving in Finland I joined the Finnish Union of University Lecturers (YLL www.yll.fi ). Despite limitations in Finnish language skills, I was active in the local branch of the union.

Soon I became vice-Chair. This had little to do with my unionist credentials: fortunately, I could not be secretary because of my poor Finnish (a wonderful excuse that I still use 35 years later), nor could I be treasurer (in those days, foreigners in full-time employment for the state could not even have a credit card; they were financially untrustworthy – perfectly correct in my case) and there was someone much more talented than myself who was the automatic choice to be Chair (he is now Vice-Chancellor of the University of Vaasa), so the only job left for me was vice-Chair.

However, this post did allow me to appreciate how difficult it was for individual employees to be exploited by the employer. There was clear principle that, regardless of gender or nationality, everyone in the country, holding a post with a particular title was paid the same salary and had the same duties.

This is something that YLL has always had as a corner stone for its activities. When titles such as Junior Lecturer and Senior Lecturer were used by the employer to pay some people less than others for basically doing the same work, YLL pressed for the removal of such divisions. Equal pay for equal work.

The union is as good as its active members

The arrival of the rather less transparent new salary scheme put the principle of equal pay for equal work to the test. YLL was successful, with the help of the umbrella negotiating organisation JUKO, in having a clause included in the agreement that stated clearly that salaries were not to be tied to the job title, but to the work. The employer broke this agreement, and so on behalf of those members, some of whom were non-Finns, who were prepared to challenge the employer the union went to court and won the case. This is a warning example; the union is as good as its active members, and the employer is only as good as the union obliges it to be.

The essential drive by universities towards recruiting internationally could put the principle of equal pay for equal work under threat. The union and its members must be vigilant.

Gordon Roberts
Lecturer
University of Oulu