Welcome to Finland, the country where the exploitation and abuse of the proles looks pretty civil to outsiders, but it is such a devious fucking system with nowehere to turn, that the only way I can describe it is as a carceral system.
My partner has worked hard his whole life. He was a welder who happily worked in the ship building industry until neoliberals made landfall here in the 90s and he as a union man (steward) was eventually let go. He did odd jobs after that, but never found anything permanent so he decided to go to nursing school and became a practical nurse.
He was great at it. Did it for 10 years until he got so severely burnt out by it that it nearly killed him. He has never recovered and applied for retirement then, but wasn’t allowed to retire. He’s been in these joke jobs assigned by the empoyment agency several times since. They were short contracts of all kinds, but those at least were paid work. And his disability was taken to account with things like 4 hour days which he could still do.
He has been on this slightly better unemployment now for little over a year after the last stint of work. It’s the sort of benefit that ends after a period and you drop to this shittier general benefit that we can’t survive on despite my wage. He has been looking for any part-time work for 6 months now and had zero callbacks. He could probably do part-time work, he has tons of work experience in everything from construction to elderly care.
He has been in line for adhd assessement for over 2 years at this point and is still not allowed to retire, nor does he get called in to get tested. Covid also did a number on him and he is even more forgetful, tired and easily stressed than before.
And now the unemployment agency decided to put him into a 3 months “work rehearsal” which means no wage slave labor, full time. As a janitor for some small business owner. This way he gets to stay on that higher benefit tier for three more months, but after that it will end anyway. This is no prospect for actual waged work, nor does he get even meals or any support for commuting, but has to pay all that out of pocket. Yet it is mandatory and if he was to refuse, his entire benefit would be cut.
He also can’t call in sick at all, because sick days for the poors have a 7 day wait period for any sort of sick leave payment and unemployment also isn’t paid for sick days. So if he can’t do this, he gets financially fucked.
So here I sit. Listening to this amazing human sleep as he has to get up at 6am to go to work for free and pay for the bus to get there. All to be just as unemployed three months from now as he is now. Time he could spend trying to find actual paid part-time work that would not burn him out.
This won’t end well. I hate it.
I hate this for you, comrade.
Thank you for giving us a glimpse beyond the puff-pieces about Finland.
Happy to, because it drives me up the wall when I see the articles about this “happiest nation in the world” shared around, especially by “progressives”.
Like ffs ask someone who has tried to live life here as a poor after the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s been shit all the way through.
I had a summer job as an au pair in Finland many years ago. While I loved the country, I was absolutely shocked by the number of homeless people, and the state of them. Huge numbers of very elderly men dressed in filthy, literal rags with actual holes in their boots, sleeping outside in the street. The family I worked for also seemed to struggle to afford food despite both parents being in work. The portions we were given were so tiny I would always go out for extra food at night. The kids were always starving, they would snatch food off my plate when their parents weren’t looking. One night I was left home alone with the kids and realised there was nothing to feed them. I phoned the mother who told me to just give them fruit. But there was nothing in the bowl but a pear. I divided the pear between the younger kids and me and the older kid got nothing. The parents seemed to think this was acceptable and the kids seemed used to it.
Sounds about right. A lot of folks here are also heavily invested in performing the life of a “normative citizen” and if these parents were that type, they probably were watching their food intake. Values tend to be very eugenist adjacent.