Sean Crowley
Like Yosser in Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff – an eighties TV drama set in unemployed Liverpool - I’m angry. I’m angry because after more than a year in Finland I cannot find a job. After registering as a job seeker, the Labour Ministry sent me on a three-month intensive language course in Lahti, designed to fast-track me into work.
Let me tell you about some of the people on the course that began last April. We are all professionals: the kind of individuals that should have the best chance of finding employment in Finland. Nine months later, not one person from that course has a job, not one. Some have left Finland in disgust.
A few examples: Finland is gagging for qualified medical personnel. Shelley is a trained theatre nurse, but after attaining a reasonable level of ability in the language as a result of the course, she was turned down by all the major hospitals in and around Lahti on the basis that she did not have a Finnish qualification, objections from the union, language skills not good enough, etc. Shelley has been forced to uproot her family and leave Finland for want of a job.
Alan is a skilled electrician with years of experience. This young American was top of the class with an uncanny ability to pick up and use the language. After half a year of humiliation on “work placement” schemes and broken promises from employers Alan is packing his bags for California.
Gordon is a published research chemist with a Phd. He has also been forced to break up his family and take up employment in France after having sent out 123 CVs and attended numerous interviews here in Finland. Gordon is fed up of hearing that his Finnish is not good enough from local research institutions and companies where English is the lingua franca. The last straw came for him when he was again turned down for a position that he was eminently suitable for on the grounds that as a Canadian, he posed a “security risk”.
Most of the others on the course were not new arrivals at all. To my surprise many could speak fluent Finnish already, like Lynn from China who has been unemployed for nearly ten years! Victims of the “education for its own sake” syndrome here in Finland. For me, their presence on the course is proves as myth that the knowledge of the language is the passport to integration and employment.
Is it not utopian for someone new to Finnish to be fluent in this obscure tongue in 12 weeks? Well that’s what the ministry believes. After the language course I returned to the labour ministry for an interview. Following a careful explanation of my background and experience and a short discussion on the kind of employment I would like: journalism, editing, development work, I was offered a job in a wood factory or the chance to drive a bus. The rest of my “integration” plan consisted of the staff member assigned to me surfing the Internet for five minutes and coming up with an open position that I had previously identified. Their solution: yes, you’ve guessed it, go on another language course! Sure, I would love to spend three years learning Finnish, just one tiny detail: I have a family to feed. Since then I have had no interaction with the office.
I am angry for the thousand of migrants to Finland who do not have my advantages of being white, educated, experienced and with good contacts here. If people like me cannot get work in Finland, then what chance do the rest have? When is Finland going to stop seeing foreigners as a threat and embrace them as an asset? Very few of the hundreds of non-Finns that I have spoken to want hand outs, simply the chance to work in their own profession and to contribute to society.
An increasingly vocal community of foreigners here want to see genuine attempts by the authorities to help non-Finns into employment. How about a quota system or positive discrimination to reduce the very high unemployment levels among immigrants? Language training should take place alongside meaningful work placements instead of sending foreigners on endless courses where they chant Finnish nursery rhymes and know all about the plural partitive while their chances of landing a proper job fade.
Why is the ability to speak perfect Finnish so often used as a reason not to employ a foreigner? I am not suggesting that the language is forsaken to accommodate non-speakers, but the reality is that ninety-nine percent of Finns that I have met speak good English! The language bar being set so high here often hides other reasons why a non-Finn is unwelcome in an organisation or company.
As for myself, I am a native-English speaking journalist and former UN diplomat. I have sent out more than 70 CVs to prospective employers. The vast majority of companies do not even bother to reply. Or I am told to call back in four years when my Finnish is fluent. So I sit at home trying to make a one-man business work in a country that prefers to interact with its own kind. But at least I am no longer an unemployed foreigner as far as the statistics are concerned…
The economic and demographic backdrop to all this is a nation desperately short of skilled workers. The falling birth rate combined with the fact that around 700,000 Finns are set to retire over the next three decades begs the question who will be around to run the economy? More importantly who will pay the taxes to look after all those elderly sitting in nursing homes? Before looking abroad for new migrants, Finland should be doing much more to utilise the 130,000 non-Finns already here, most of whom are sitting on their bums as a result of prejudice, red tape, suspicion and short sightedness here in Moomin Land.
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