The high fees exacted for squalid lodgings also circumvent wage provisions, according to trade unions all around Finland.
“It’s a competitive advantage. They’re pushing the prices down. Twenty workers in a two-room flat, working twelve-hour days. When ten men sleep, ten others work,” describes a Finnish worker laid off from the Turku shipyard.
Rarely uttered complaints
Currently nobody is working at the Turku shipyard due to the bad situation in the industry, neither foreigners nor Finns. However, this phenomenon is familiar to Turku and also other places around the country.
The chief shop steward Jari Aalto from the STX Finland shipyard in Turku has also had to intervene in cases of workers living in quarters hardly better than rabbit hutches. He says that foreigners do not really complain about their dwellings. However, reports do come through once the situation becomes urgent enough.
Aalto punctuates his account with examples:
“People are put to live in industrial buildings, even in the winter. They are also accommodated in the common areas of factories and workshops. If living in a regular apartment block, 10-20 people could be staying in a two-room flat. Each is charged the full rent. So the employer does a good business in renting too.”
An expensive rent is a way to gain back wage provisions specified in the workers’ contracts, if industrial safety inspectors are checking that wages are being paid. Money given to workers can come back to the employer through rent.
Aalto says that the poorly paid labourers only complain about accommodation when their whole situation is really dire, and they have not even received salaries or payment for overtime work.
Ineffective laws
Finnish laws are impotent when it comes to poor living conditions of foreign workers. Nobody is monitoring, nor can monitor, how many people may live in the same apartment. The Finnish Immigration Service, while wondering at the number of people registered at the same address, can do nothing. Neither can industrial safety inspectors or the Ministry of the Interior.
Janne Vainio from Eurajoki, the contact person for the Metalworkers’ Union’s Olkiluoto 3 project, questions why the law that allowed control over such situations is no longer valid.
“In the 2000s, living conditions at our industrial projects and job postings haven’t always been humane.”
Vainio also says that businesses that offer squalid lodgings to cheap labourers are putting the honest entrepreneurs at a disadvantage.
“In Finland, we have large concentrations of industrial production, around which subcontractors’ depots are located. People are put to live in building site containers, which aren’t actually meant to be lived in. They don’t even have running water.”
Speaking of such harsh realities, Vainio says that the area is rife with economic crime by the Mafia as well as human trafficking.