Vanhanen has a go at nurses' union

Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen had a few choice words of the Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy):

"Targeting industrial action on targets where, according to official estimates, the result would have been the loss of human lives within hours is unprecedented in the history of Finnish industrial action," Mr Vanhanen said at a Finnish Central Chamber of Commerce event.

Mr Vanhanen added the union should have warned its members what kind of consequences they would face in the event of deaths attributable to their participation in the planned industrial action.

The prime minister said Tehy's mass resignation, although averted on Monday, had lowered the government's threshold to intervene in industrial action.

A prepared copy of the speech can be read here (fi). One notable aspect of it is that Vanhanen said the deal signed by the Union of Practical Nurses (SuPer), among other municipal employees' unions, "succesfully took into consideration female majority fields" and showed that "good results can be achieved through normal labor market practices". That is, he was pretty pleased with the offer Tehy turned down.

Vanhanen also had a pop at the opposition: "It openly accepted the situation that nurses threaten with their resignations people's health and life, and the state must solve the row with money." He went on to note that any of the current opposition parties would be the 'weak link' in future governments unless they take back what they've said on the topic.

Shockingly enough, the opposition didn't appreciate Vanhanen's views.

Next US president and NATO

Last month Risto E J Penttilä, head of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA), wrote (fi) in Taloussanomat about the meaning of a Hillary Clinton presidency to Finnish foreign policy (my translation):

When Hillary Clinton tells Finns that NATO is an alternative to American autocracy, Finnish 'intellectuals' will begin to examine the military alliance in a new way. When Clinton tells Finns that Europe's influence in NATO will rise, presidential candidate Niinistö smiles. When Clinton says to Halonen that Finland's conciliatory abilities, peacekeeping knowhow, and good relations with Russia would be needed in NATO, intensive deliberation will begin also at the highest level. Is it truly the case that NATO has become an ordinary international organization which we too should join?

The suggestion that joining NATO would somehow limit American power is rather bizarre. Presently it's difficult to discertain any such mechanism at work, and surely nothing would change on that front should Finland join the club. If the United States really, really wanted to invade a random Middle Eastern country, then that's what would happen.

Still, the main point, if exaggerated here, is sound enough: a new US president, one less belligerent than the current officeholder, would probably boost NATO's popularity. I've written as much before.

The problem is that even if the bad US presidents eventually leave office, so do the good ones. Thus, it's not a sound approach to base one's NATO position on just how belligerent the current office holder happens to be - or who you expect to win the next election. You might get a Clinton or, better yet, an Obama. You might also get a Giuliani, after which the Bush years might seem like the good old days.

All Finnish newspapers 1771-1890

The Finnish National Library now offers in digital format all newspapers published in Finland between the years 1771 and 1890, free of charge. The archive is even searchable - the search feature appears to have some problems, but you should be able to work around the issues. Browsing by name of newspaper and date works, too, if you know what you're looking for.

I searched for my surname and have spent the last 30 minutes reading about criminal ancestors: a couple running a brothel in Mikkeli, or at least offering lodging to women of loose morals; a Kurkijoki man who committed suicide by shooting himself in the gut after getting mixed up in the disappearance of a drunken ex-soldier; a skilled artisan - blacksmith, carpenter, stonemason, and watchmaker - from Rautalammi who kept getting arrested for theft... Great stuff.

All over but for the spin

Helsingin Sanomat explains why the Commission for Local Authority Employers (KT) and the Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy) disagree on how large the agreed-upon wage increases are:

A large part of the differences in interpretation stem from the fact that Tehy assumes that overall pay hikes of 4-6 per cent will be implemented in the municipal sector in 2010-2011. The municipal employers make no such assumptions for the last two years of the contract period, as the general contract in the municipal sector ends at the end of January 2010.

The actual size of pay increases at that time will not be known until 2010-2011, but it is expected that Tehy members will see their pay rise by more than 20 per cent in the next four years.

I find it interesting how well the lengthy contract period has served to cloud comparisons between this agreement on one hand, and rival trade unions' contracts or Tehy's demands on the other. A 22 percent pay hike - to pick a number - in four years obviously isn't anywhere near a 24 percent raise in two and a half years, but that fact doesn't come across in many news stories.

The scope of the agreement has also caused disagreement. The contract is supposed to apply to only Tehy members, but experts disagree (fi) on whether this is legal. Law mavens may want to check out the Employment Contracts Act (PDF), which states among other things that employers "shall not exercise any unjustified discrimination against employees on the basis of ... trade union activity ... or any other comparable circumstance" and that they must "treat employees equally unless there is an acceptable cause for derogation deriving from the duties and position of the employees."

Poll: Centre 22.6, Coalition 22.3, Soc Dems 22.3

YLE published a Taloustutkimus party support poll (fi) today which supports the trends seen in the latest TNS Gallup poll. The Centre Party is back on top by virtue of holding steady while the National Coalition Party is losing support. The Social Democratic Party is pretty much tied for second and the Left Alliance seems to be on an upswing for a change.

It'll be interesting to see whether the government parties' fortunes will improve in post-nurses' pay dispute polls.

CP   NCP  SDP  LA  GL   CD  SPP TF  gov  source
23.1 22.3 21.4 8.8 8.5  4.9 4.6 4.1 58.5 PE 3/18
23.0 24.1 20.7 8.2 9.4  4.5 4.4 4.5 60.9 TT 4/5
22.8 23.3 21.1 8.4 8.9  4.5 4.3 4.9 59.3 TG 5/20
23.4 23.3 20.8 9.0 9.6  5.0 4.1 4.4 60.4 RI 5/25
22.4 23.4 21.7 8.4 10.1 4.7 4.1 4.3 60.0 TT 6/9
23.0 23.2 21.5 8.3 9.0  4.3 4.2 5.0 59.4 TG 6/26
22.8 23.9 21.2 8.5 9.3  4.7 4.4 4.3 60.4 TT 7/2
22.3 23.6 21.2 8.5 9.4  4.6 4.5 4.7 59.8 TT 8/13
22.7 23.2 21.6 8.1 9.4  4.7 4.5 4.6 59.8 TT 9/9
22.5 22.6 21.5 8.4 9.0  4.6 4.6 5.0 58.7 TG 9/22
22.6 22.8 21.8 7.9 9.8  4.8 4.4 4.8 59.6 TT 10/13
22.6 21.7 21.7 8.6 9.1  4.6 4.7 5.1 58.1 TG 10/31
22.6 22.3 22.3 8.4 9.7  4.4 4.6 5.0 59.2 TT 11/19

Legend:
CP = Centre Party
NCP = National Coalition Party
SDP = Social Democratic Party
LA = Left Alliance
GL = Green League
CD = Christian Democrats
SPP = Swedish People's Party
TF = True Finns
gov = government parties
PE = parliamentary election
TT = Taloustutkimus / YLE
TG = TNS Gallup / Helsingin Sanomat
RI = Research International Finland / MTV3

Nurses accept pay deal

The Finnish Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy) and the Commission for Local Authority Employers (KT) have approved the settlement committee's proposal. I must say that this is a welcome outbreak of sanity. Huzzah and all that.

There are slight differences of opinion as to what's in the agreement. According to KT (fi), the deal will raise Tehy members' salaries by 15.7 to 17.7 percent and cost about 500 million euros a year. According to Tehy (fi), salaries will go up by 22 to 28 percent. The real figure is at the moment anyone's guess, but either way, it's gonna cost ya.

Politically this counts as a victory for the government, I should think. The patient safety bill didn't doom the negotiations and the state didn't need to cough up extra money after all - although it remains to be seen whether the government agreed to do something for the municipalities later on. Vanhanen, Katainen, and friends must also be chuffed that the deal ends only after the next parliamentary election.

Unanimous proposal in nurses' pay dispute

After a weekend of hunting down nurses to hand them their notices to turn up for work on Tuesday - about 60 percent had been reached as of Sunday evening - we now have some good news:

The panel negotiating the nurses' wage dispute agreed on a proposal for a settlement on Sunday evening. The four-year contract plan was approved unanimously by the negotiators.

No details of the offer will be made public until -- and unless -- it is accepted by the two sides: the Union of Health and Social Care Professionals (Tehy) and the Commission for Local Authority Employers (KT).

The decisions will be taken tomorrow, Tehy first and then KT. Let's hope this is it and we can start debating about who deserves credit for the raises instead of apportioning blame for dead patients. The unanimity suggests that at least the Tehy leaders who are on the panel support this deal. No details will be given of the proposal until and unless it's accepted, except that the length of the deal would be four years instead of the usual two and a half.

Soft on crime and proud of it

For an interesting (and sympathetic) look at the Finnish criminal justice system, see "Finland Is Soft on Crime" by Dan Gardner, originally published in Ottawa Citizen in 2002. I especially enjoyed this anecdote:

In the 1960s, Finland began edging cautiously toward reform, using its Scandinavian neighbors as models. Nils Christie, a renowned Norwegian criminologist, recalls speaking to Finnish judges and criminologists in Helsinki in 1968. At the time, Mr. Christie and others were developing the first international comparisons of prison populations, so he was the first to tell the Finns that their incarceration rate was totally unlike that of their Scandinavian neighbors and was "really in the Russian tradition." The audience was shocked, Mr Christie recalls in an interview in Ottawa, "and some of them then decided this was not a very good policy."

You have to admit that "Let's not be like Russia" is a pretty Finnish motive for social reforms.

(Link spotted on Bookforum.com.)

Patient safety bill passes

It's a law:

President Tarja Halonen signed the bill into law on Friday afternoon. It takes effect on Saturday.

Parliament approved the bill by a vote of 113-68, with the entire opposition voting against it and 18 MPs absent.

Those missing included Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, who was hospitalised overnight with lower back pain. He was diagnosed with a stone in his urinary tract, and is expected to remain in hospital at least through Friday.

Wonderful timing from Vanhanen.

The voting record can be viewed here (fi). All MPs from government parties either voted for it or were absent. (The Centre Party's Paula Sihto, a Tehy board member and probably the likeliest defector, was among the latter.)

Long-term damage to Coalition

Yesterday Egan asked whether the nurses' pay row is going to seriously damage the National Coalition Party in the long term.

Looking at recent polls, it seems likely to me that the issue currently hurts the party's popularity. The decrease in support is only a couple of percentage points at the moment, but when the big three parties are so closely balanced, it can still make the difference between holding the office of prime minister and being in the opposition. That's serious.

At some point the issue will stop being a pressing concern. Will the damage last? I think the key here is Finance Minister and Coalition chair Jyrki Katainen. The party itself has a core of ideologically committed supporters and a rather stable image built in countless political rows over the decades. In the long, long term, it'll abide. Whether Katainen remains an effective, credible spokesman for the party is another matter.

I trust I won't be accused of exaggeration when I say that Katainen has come under a great deal of criticism over this issue. He was at the center of the Coalition's pay equality campaign and now holds the state's purse strings, so he's a natural target for nurses' ire. Yesterday's demonstration at the parliament building featured a rendition of "Jyrki Boy" (fi).

With regard to Katainen's credibility, the key quote is (my translation), "The more female-dominated, educated fields are paid over the general raise level, the more we're prepared to raise the state assistance paid to municipalities." The quote is from last February, but its infamy is a post-election phenomenon. Googling for the original Finnish sentence gets about 500 hits at the time of writing.

In summary, my confident prediction on whether the Coalition has suffered serious long-term damage is: maybe, depending on how the party chair comes out of it.

You don't negotiate with terrorists

The Green League seems to be putting forth an effort to get out its point of view on the patient safety bill. Jyrki Kasvi MP and Oras Tynkkynen MP both wrote blog posts defending the bill, as did Green parliamentary group leader Anni Sinnemäki (all in Finnish). The general arguments are the same in all three posts. All remember to express the view that nurses should be paid more. Both Sinnemäki and Kasvi cite the International Labor Organization in support of the position that industrial action shouldn't threaten lives.

Everyone isn't quite as coordinated. Osmo Soininvaara, former Green League chair and in my opinion a pretty clever fellow, is out of the daily grind of politics and can afford to take a more combative stance. He has a go (fi) at both sides in Iltalehti:

"How could this strife become a crisis, although everyone agreed that a pay problem that had been known for a long time would be fixed? All sides have only made a mess of it and acted in a totally incomprehensible way."

"Firstly the [National] Coalition [Party]'s election advertising was wholly irresponsible. That the parliament doesn't promise wages to anyone has always been attended to, but they made it into an election campaign."

"When government then gave money to the municipalities, the municipal employers went ahead and sprinkled it evenly on the entire municipal field. It was totally mindless. Even those who hadn't asked for money got it."

"[The Union of Health and Social Care Professionals' (Tehy)] blackmail campaign makes it terribly difficult to agree to the nurses' demands."

"It's a general principle that you mustn't pay for hostages, otherwise they will become common. This is blackmail with human lives. If you give in to it, then every following strike is arranged in the same way."

So he supports the bill.

"If electricians for example thought of putting hospital emergency rooms on strike, it would then be forbidden."

"Tehy would have had several methods which wouldn't have amounted to blackmail."

"Now finding an an agreement is easier, because the principle according to which everyone who threatens to kill gets money is no longer in force because of [the bill]. It's morally easier to agree to Tehy's demands, because it won't set a precedent."

Especially the language concerning Tehy is the sort of thing you won't be hearing from many active politicians.

Meanwhile, here are the first poll figures on the issue:

56 of the respondents backed the draft law while 35 per cent did not. About a tenth were undecided.

In other polls commissioned by YLE, about 60 percent of respondents have consistently said that they "accept in this situation Tehy's industrial action". (The word "hyväksyä", used in the polls, can be translated as "accept" or "approve". Who knows how respondents interpret it.)

Government's rejection of nurses' demands

Financial Times' David Ibison wrote an article on the patient safety bill that contains some quite misleading paragraphs:

The government's rejection of nurses' demands for a 24 per cent wage rise over two years prompted nearly 13,000 nurses to threaten to resign next Monday, bringing some of the country's top hospitals to a standstill.

The entity that rejected the nurses' demands was of course the Commission for Local Authority Employers, the municipal employers' organization. It's not the same thing as the government at all.

The dispute underscores the growing tension between Finland's right-leaning government, which has abolished most collective wage agreements and asked unions to negotiate on an individual basis, and a labour force more accustomed to across-the-board agreements. A wave of strikes has hit the country, affecting 40,000 workers.

Ibisen again confuses the government and the various employers' organizations. The government, for its part, would have been just fine with an across-the-board agreement. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen still pines after one (fi).

By contrast, Bloomberg's Kati Pohjanpalo has a rather good background article on the issue. In addition to getting the facts right, it even offers context.