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APN podcast: Is there a foreigner wage gap?

Yle News' All Points North podcast asks if foreigners get paid less than Finns.

Photo of construction workers on escalators, featuring the All Points North podcast logo.
Image: Henrietta Hassinen / Yle
  • Yle News

This week the podcast asks if Finland's workplaces have a pay gap, with foreigners earning lower salaries than their Finnish counterparts.

Susanna Bairoh from the TEK engineering union says that information from their members suggests it might be an issue.

"What the results show at the moment or for some years is that those who come from a country outside the EU or ETA do tend to get less pay," Bairoh tells APN.

"Now the problem is that it is not very straightforward to compare salaries of people because you have to take into account their position for example and their work experience. I think that if you compare people at the same level, for example expert levels, then the salaries are a little bit closer — at least that's the case between women and men — but at management level there are fairly large gaps."

You can listen to the full podcast using the embedded player here, via Yle Areena, Spotify or Apple Podcasts or on your usual podcast player using the RSS feed.

Article continues after audio.

Does Finland have a foreigner salary gap?
Image: Yle

This week the captain of the Finnish men's national football team, Tim Sparv, said that he wanted to see more activism around the upcoming World Cup in Qatar.

Thousands of migrant workers have died constructing stadia for the 2022 World Cup in the middle-eastern country, and Sparv said in an opinion piece that it was time to talk about their fate.

"Let's wake people up," wrote Sparv. "I'm sure there are many people in Finland alone who have no idea what’s going on in Qatar."

We ask Norwegian journalist Lars Sivertsen, who has reported on migrant workers from Qatar, how significant Sparv's intervention is.

"I think obviously the Qatar issue has been a big issue for people who care about it for a long time, but outside of those activists and people who are engaged in the human rights question, there's not been much discussion at all," said Sivertsen.

"And when a player like Tim Sparv raises the question then it pushes it into spheres where that discussion wasn't perhaps being had at all."

Join the conversation!

This week's show was presented by Zena Iovino and Egan Richardson. The producer was Mark B. Odom and the audio engineer was Anders Johansson.

If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts, just contact us via WhatsApp on +358 44 421 0909, on our Facebook or Twitter accounts, or at yle.news@yle.fi and allpointsnorth@yle.fi.