All Helsinki crammed in a tram

The tram takes 175 passengers, but who would they be?

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By Merituuli Saikkonen
     
      A muslim, seven widows, as many unemployed persons, 18 wealthy types, and a couple of football teams of pensioners.
      They and many more would all fit on board if Helsinki were to be packed in microcosm into a standard city tram.
     
There would be 93 women among the company.
      That makes 53.14% of the 175 passengers who can be squeezed into a Helsinki tram, and there is nothing new about it: the capital Helsinki has always had more females than males on the register.
      Women live longer, for a start, and they also move to the cities more eagerly than do men.
      At one time women used to come to the towns as maids "in service", while the men stayed behind with Mum (and under her thumb) and went to work on the land.
     
Helsinki was at its most female-dominated in the years after World War II.
      In the late 1940s and into the early 50s, there were as many as 1,400 women for every 1,000 men in the city - a quite astonishing imbalance.
      Now the shortage of men brought by the war has been more or less clawed back. Health amongst males has also improved, and they are catching the women in terms of life expectancy.
      Helsinki is therefore gaining somewhat in the testosterone department.
      If Helsinki were to be crammed into a tram once again twenty years from now, there would be at least four more men vying for a seat.
     
Equally, in a couple of decades there would be more elderly people expecting to get a seat, since Helsinki is ageing at a brisk pace, along with the entire country.
      Right now there are almost as many pensioners in Helsinki as there are kids under the age of 15.
      In the future the relative share of children under 15 will stay roughly the same, but the proportion of those over 65 will rise from 14% to approximately one in five, estimates Pekka Vuori, Senior Population Statistician with Helsinki Urban Facts.
      "A large bunch of people in good shape and living a life of ease", is Vuori's description of the future senior citizens.
      "Not necessarily a complete life of ease", challenges Vuori's colleague Sini Askelo. "Twenty years hence, more and more of the population over the age of 65 will be going to work."
      In recent years it is specifically those in the over-55s category who have shown the greatest increase in numbers at work.
     
As well as carrying more elderly people, the tram of the future will contain more foreigners than the fourteen who now share the space with 161 Finns.
      By 2030, as many as one in five might speak another language at home than Finnish.
      At present, something like one in ten of Helsinki residents speak a language other than Finnish or Swedish.
      After these two languages, the next most common tongues to be heard in the trams or outside them are Russian, Estonian, and Somali.
     
In this respect, things have changed quite a lot since as recently as 1990, when there were just 26,000 foreign citizens registered in the entire country (as against 143,250 in 2008), and when the largest numbers came from Sweden, Germany, the United States, and the U.K.
      Their numbers have grown, too, since then, but they have been dwarfed by arrivals from other countries - not just the three mentioned above, but also from China, Thailand, Turkey, Iraq, from the former Yugoslavia, and also from Iran and Vietnam and Afghanistan.
     
If Helsinki had been "trammed" in the 1950s, a good many of the passengers would have been on their way to or from a factory of some description. Helsinki still had plenty of industry at that time.
      Not so now.
      Today Helsinki's largest source of employment is business. The production of goods and services has declined somewhat, while production of content has increased.
      The statisticians ponder what sort of workplaces the 175 passengers on the hypothetical rush-hour tram will be heading for in twenty years from now.
      "Will the jobs of the future be found from innovation, content production, or design? It remains to be seen which branch of commerce emerges on top after the recession", says Vuori.
     
Sini Askelo believes that the caring professions will provide a decent share of the work opportunities of women into the foreseeable future.
      Already today more Helsinki women than men are in full-time employment.
      What troubles the actuaries is the unskilled labourers of the future - or more pertinently, the glaring absence of them.
      "If every job requires a degree or diploma, where are we going to employ those for whom book-learning doesn't appeal?"
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.12.2009

More on this subject:
 They've got a ticket to ride...

Links:
  City of Helsinki Urban Facts

MERITUULI SAIKKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
merituuli.saikkonen@hs.fi