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.
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.
What the actual fuck.
Pretty sure the UK does some of this too, though not to anyone disabled and claiming pip afaik. @DisabledAceSocialist@hexbear.net would probably know more, I’ve been disengaged with our hellscape of jobseeker shit and what they force people to do for a while.
For no pay???
Depends on the scheme, but generally yes that has occurred. I am not up to date so will refrain on saying whether it is currently happening this instant, but it has certainly been the case at times in the last 20 years. The general gist is that you go to work for a workfare employer or lose benefits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workfare_in_the_United_Kingdom
It is difficult for me to be precise about this topic because the system is ever-changing. It has changed so many fucking times in the last 30 years the only people that can really tell you for certain what is currently happening are the people currently experiencing it.
These are the same people who make propaganda about “Stalinist bureaucracy”.
Yes the UK has been doing this for decades. I’ve been aware of it from 25 years ago. I had a friend at the time who’d been unemployed for a while. He’d been to a school so awful it had been shut down, so through no fault of his own he had left with no GCSEs and barely literate. He had trouble even filling in job application forms. After being unemployed for about 2 years they told him he had to start earning his jobseeker’s allowance. And what they mad him do was just plain weird. He had to stand in the town centre, fundraising from passersby and then use the money to round up all the homeless people in town and take them on a day trip.
In the years after that, unemployed people on benefits were forced to work full time in shops such as Poundland. They didn’t actually get paid wages for this, they just carried on getting their pittance of jobseekers allowance. A woman who was forced to do this took the government to court after the government stopped her from doing voluntary work in a museum and forced her to work for free (except for her JSA) in poundland instead.
A man who was told to do unpaid labour cleaning furniture and refused, also sued the government. The court ruled that these people should be allowed to retain their JSA. However even today people who don’t find a job within 18 months can be forced to take a work placement or “intensive activity” or lose their benefits. These work placements are usually menial stuff that won’t help the person obtain a long term job. It would be better to focus on helping people develop useful skills but we’re still living in a Victorian mentality where people need to be punished rather than helped.
He had trouble even filling in job application forms. After being unemployed for about 2 years they told him he had to start earning his jobseeker’s allowance. And what they mad him do was just plain weird. He had to stand in the town centre, fundraising from passersby and then use the money to round up all the homeless people in town and take them on a day trip.
That is wild I’ve never heard a story like that before.
In the years after that, unemployed people on benefits were forced to work full time in shops such as Poundland. They didn’t actually get paid wages for this, they just carried on getting their pittance of jobseekers allowance. A woman who was forced to do this took the government to court after the government stopped her from doing voluntary work in a museum and forced her to work for free (except for her JSA) in poundland instead.
Yes i vividly recall the poundland period. There were some people I knew at the time who would sign off briefly with some contract work then sign back on to reset the time they had been seeking work so they fell out of the requirements for forcing people into that. I think it was 3 months unemployed? I don’t recall very well.
It would be better to focus on helping people develop useful skills but we’re still living in a Victorian mentality where people need to be punished rather than helped.
Privatisation of all of these systems with Capita taking over also turned all the staff members that administer the system from being people looking to help into people that despise people on benefits and are looking solely to catch them out.
There was stuff in the news a few years ago about how DWP staff were filmed by an undercover person, amusing themselves by making up their own quotas of how many people to refuse benefits to, literally refusing people benefits just for fun. The entire system is designed to torment people rather than help.
Set it up like uber or just eat and have people on benefits rate every single one of their interactions with the system and how well they feel they are being helped with their situation.
The attitude will completely shift and the system will have genuinely useful metrics coming straight from the people who actually need the help.
They’ll never do this. The government feeds all of the news stories about how benefit claimants have it too good because they want people to hate us and turn against benefits, so they can cut them without backlash. That’s why, despite most benefit claimants struggling on a pittance, there are always news stories about the very few who are doing well on benefits, making out it’s like that for everyone. Just the other day there was a woman bragging in a news article that she’s a benefit claimant and that she’s going to get an extra 5K or something a year, and now angry people are writing articles about how this show people on benefits get too much and it needs to be stopped.
Right? They call this a work try-out, like it’s something anyone would willingly do. Work fulltime for free…
The employment agency person was all like: “This way we can see if you can still handle full-time work with your undiagnosed ADHD.” Ignoring the severe burn out and the fact that the last time he tried to work fulltime, he lasted about a month before he started to fall apart and needed a year to recover.
The way these bureacraries and laws in Finland have been fine tuned to destroy people is something I see every day at my work but also in our personal lives. There’s always a law or a dictate allowing these institutions to do the most ghoulish decicions with peoples lives and they all amplify each other. People are completely trapped in these systems just to survive poorly.
The more i learn about finland, both here and from finnish friends, the worse and worse the picture becomes. Im so sorry he is/you two are being put through this, its wretched. It doesnt solve anything but hugs offered if you want them
Thank you comrade
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.
Death to the Finnish SState. I’m sorry this is happening to you and your partner.
Thank you for the solidarity. I am so worried for him.
I wish I had more work so we could survive just by that, we have been poor for so long that we could easily do it, but my current wage won’t be enough. I am currently part-time and it will take me a year at least to finish my degree and be eligible for full time positions, another feature of this same system btw.
And as I work, if he were to drop of the unemployment, he would get nothing at all. Because in this same system if a spouse has a wage, they are deemed responsible for the other person entirely and the person isn’t eligible to the basic social security or housing aid as long as they are in the same household with a wage earner. If I was on student benefits and loan, he would be eligible for the benefits. So me working is actually a bad choice for us, but I don’t want more student loan anymore and don’t dare to let this job go, because I probably would not get it back. This is such a fucked up system.
Thank you
That’s so fucked up, I’m sorry :(
Thank you for the solidarity, it’s incredibly fucked up and this is just one thing, there’s do much shit like this.
He works for free? What!?
Many young people are put in this “work try-out” as well, but wait, there’s more…
The Finnish unemployment system has for decades had a thing called “rehabilitative work” where long term unemployed are put and essentially made to work for free. Or they do get 9€/day of “expense reimbursement”, lol.
This too isn’t a choice or something people can say no to. If you do, your unemployment is ended or you are sanctioned. My partner has done this too, twice. The work is typically third sector stuff and isn’t so bad, but this is how the third sector&state system has been running for years and these “rehabilitative workers” have also been the backbones of municipality funding because municipalities have been getting state funding to “employ them”. This money is never seen by the people doing the actual work.
And as an icing on this shitcake, starting next year the cutting of social security will include the basic social security too that everyone should have a right to get regardless of their situation. It’s never been true though, they always deny it if they can find a loophole.
But as of Jan they can cut it by 50% without notice if the person “refuses to participate in activating actions with the unemployment agency”. This includes disabled, ill and other comrades who aren’t allowed to retire or who are otherwise clearly unable to work. But everyone has to “activate” or they will starve.
Come to think of it, I had to do something similar when I was on food stamps a few years ago (in Burgerland). It comes from a resentment of people on benefits, who are perceived as unfairly gaming the system for an easy, free ride. I’m just surprised that it exists in the “SocDem holy land” of
Scandinaviathe Nordic countries.
Oh it exists. It’s just framed as “a benefit” to “provide participation” as per neoliberalism.
The people in the unemployment agencies generally think they are doing good things. I know, I have to work with them.
Oh it exists. It’s just framed as “a benefit” to “provide participation” as per neoliberalism.
The people in the unemployment agencies generally think they are doing good things. I know, I have to work with them.
6·4 days agoI don’t know who copied who but it looks similar to what I’ve seen in Denmark. Another one of the “good” social-democracies the libs love to point at. Similarly, shitty law changes happened back in the summer.
Sorry you’re being put through this.
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Yeah afaik Finnish ghouls have very keenly adopted a lot of the very horrible Danish practices.
And this shit also takes you right back to pre-WW2 Germany statebuilding. It’s pretty clear what the ideological roots are.
At this stage I wouldn’t be surprised if we all end up getting herded into gas chambers as useless eaters. Quite frankly at this point it would be a relief for me.
