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
Gordon Roberts
• Year and place of birth: 1951,
Liversedge, Yorkshire, UK
• M.A. (Hons), 1973,
University of St Andrews
• lecturer, Department of Languages
at the Vaasa School of Economics,
1975-1982
• lecturer, Language Centre,
University of Oulu, 1982-1996
• lecturer, Department of Education,
University of Oulu, 1996-
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