Finland: There is a worrying trend among some governments to try to silence the rights of working people. The right to strike is the last resort of workers to exercise their democratic rights.
Finland: There is a worrying trend among some governments to try to silence the rights of working people. The right to strike is the last resort of workers to exercise their democratic rights.
On 11 March trade unions in Finland began a wave of strike action which has closed all cargo handling in Finnish ports and halted freight traffic on railways.
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It's odd to me that Finland elected this government given their high unionization rate. I'd expect union folks to vote against them which is the majority as far as I can tell form afar. Did this party bamboozle them that they won't attack workers' rights?
Pretty much, yeah. The ”Finns Party” have marketed themselves as taking care of the average Finn, that is the workers, and this is the result. The national coalition on the other hand has never been ashamed of working as the political wing of big capital.
Are the union officials sleeping and not informing their members that this ain't im their interest?
Unions don't have the appeal that they used to and definitely not the weight they had in public discourse.
I guess things have been so good for so long that people have forgot why they were so important.
Our unions have been losing members steadily over the years, the younger people don't anymore see the advantages that the membership brings. The corporations have been publicly defaming the unions for a long time, blaming them for serving only the union leaders. And since the unions had already fought and won most of the important rights for the workers decades ago, it looked like the unions had made themselves obsolete.
The corporations also founded a "general unemployment fund", so that you could get the same unemployment advantages without joining a union and paying for the membership. This fund has been gaining more and more members since many of the younger people don't see the the value of joining the unions, believing the ongoing discredit campaign of the right wing lobby.
The current goverment coalition is just about the only one bold enough to try run this legislation through. The prime minister party "Kokoomus" will do anything the corporate lobby desires, the "Finns Party" is a power drunk protest coalition with a primary objective of keeping immigrants out - and if possible, sending the ones already here away. They'll agree to anything if they can just keep the borders closed and "owning the libs", even if this means fucking up their own voters' interests. The Swedish Party will agree to almost anything if they can keep the mandatory Swedish language in the national curriculum. And the Christian Party just want to keep religion in schools and oppose anything even remotely liberal, anything else goes for them.
Oh this is great. So the standard program. 🥲
Is there any feeling of a renewal of the awareness that unions are important, as of late?
Yes and no.
Those of us who have always seen them as desperately needed guardians of workers' rights have been proven to be right, but the masses who have bought the right wing lies see the unions as just standing in the way of economic growth. The corporate owned media spews these lies non-stop, so the uninformed may easily fall for them.
The proposed shittification of working conditions is on an unprecedented level. One would have to be a fool to think this would serve any workers, it is all just to give more power to the employers and severely limit the worker's right to protest.
Our country used to stand out in working together to find a common ground and compromises in difficult political questions. Now the country has become more and more divided into left and right. And compromises are off the table, the corporate-backed right is going for a crushing victory which would poison the political field for who knows how long.
This future looks bleak.
Sigh. Perhaps most of the workers there still have it relatively good and aren't forced to look for solutions because they're not one missed paycheck away from being homeless. So the neoliberal rhetoric still resonates. If that's true then yeah, things will have to get worse before they get better, before people rediscover what they've forgotten or have been brainwashed into dismissing.
@avidamoeba @cyu "You'll keep your jobs because we'll keep the Brown people out!" seems to be the major selling point, every time, in every country