The government said it has not abandoned its goal of reaching a 75-percent employment rate by the year 2023, which means adding 60,000 jobs to the labour force. The minister in charge of employment, Tuula Haatainen, told Yle's Ykkösaamu talk show on Saturday the administration was instead giving itself a longer timeframe to reach this target.
"When coronavirus hit, it wasn’t something we could realistically achieve during this government term, so we decided to push the deadline forward but also raise the job target to 80,000," Haatainen explained.
Before the pandemic hit, experts considered the 75-percent goal as challenging in a period of sluggish economic growth.
Working longer
To raise the employment rate, the government has set its sights on getting 10,000 more people over age 55 into work.
Experts have said reaching this goal isn’t possible without doing away with the pathway from long-term unemployment to early retirement for people over the age of 62.
The system allows long-term unemployed individuals who are near retirement age to extend their maximum unemployment allowance period beyond 500 days until they retire.
"We have age discrimination and it's something we need to root out...we want to make it possible for older people to be able to get back into the workforce, but I can’t talk about it in more detail as negotiations are still underway," she said.
The OECD has recommended Finland remove its unemployment-to-retirement system by the year 2029.
Finland lags behind its Nordic neighbours when it comes to keeping over-55s in the labour force.
Haatainen noted that the level of job search and support services in Finland has fallen behind those of its neighbours. She said that to improve the situation, the cabinet was channelling 70 million euros to employment offices to help hire 1,200 more staff at TE centres to assist jobseekers.