This week All Points North follows up on statements made by Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen last year about the capital possibly declaring itself an English-speaking city.
However, not much has happened on that front since then.
The number of people with foreign native languages is growing quickly in the Helsinki region. Their share of the local population is set to nearly double by 2035. But the employment rate of immigrants in Finland remains stubbornly low, compared to the rest of the population.
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One year on from Vartiainen's comments, a listener reached out to ask us about the topic. While we didn’t get an update from the mayor's office, we did hear from Regina Ainla of Business Finland to see what the country was doing about attracting and retaining a foreign workforce in Finland.
"Companies often say they don’t know where to find this talent that they need…and we realize that it’s because they don’t actually market their jobs, and if they do then very often it’s either in Finnish or on websites that the talent doesn’t know how to find," Ainla told APN.
"The food is the problem"
APN also spoke with journalist Galyna Sergeyeva, who works at Yle Novyny, the public broadcaster's Ukrainian language news service which was launched earlier this year.
Sergeyeva has looked into shortcomings at a reception centre in Kyyhkylä, a village near Mikkeli in the eastern part of the country.
"The problem is the food. That is the biggest problem at this reception centre, because the quality of the food is very poor, very bad. All the time [they offer] only potatoes or pasta, and that doesn't sound bad, but people say that it is disgusting," Sergeyeva told APN.
Join the discussion
This week's show was presented by Mark B. Odom and Zena Iovino. The sound engineer was Joonatan Kotila.
If you have any questions or would like to share your thoughts, 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.
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