Many foreign students receiving only trainee wages for summer work

Construction Trade Union investigating role of Finnish temp agency

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A Finnish recruiting company has begun to bring Eastern European university students to work in Finland with low, trainee-level wages.
      The Finnish Construction Trade Union, a member of the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions, is currently investigating the situation of students from Bulgaria and Poland, who have been working at construction sites in the Helsinki region for dismal wages.
      These cases do not meet the requirements of Finnish labour legislation. The Construction Trade Union sees it as a shameless way of taking advantage of foreign students.
     
Recruiting agencies operating on the fringes of legality have brought cheap foreign workers into Finland before, but the hiring of foreigners as trainees is a new phenomenon. The new immigration legislation, which took effect in May, made the arrival in Finland of foreign trainees easier than before.
      The Helsinki-based company Finneca reports providing work to around twenty Poles and Bulgarians. They have worked at construction sites, hotels, restaurants, and farms. The same company has also provided Finnish strawberry farmers with picking help from abroad.
     
In the students' home countries, the work was advertised as summer work, not a traineeship. The local partners of Finneca have told the students that they can earn several thousand euros per month in Finland.
      In practice, the students have been paid a monthly wage of 510 euros. They have also needed to pay the local partners of Finneca between 600 and 1,100 euros for providing the job.
      In addition, Finneca has billed the employers of the students 250 euros per worker.
      Finneca and two of the construction companies that have hired the students do not consider the pay too low, as they claim the students are trainees.
     
The Construction Trade Union maintains that the students have been regularly employed by the construction firms, as all official traineeships should pass through the union. In fact, in Finland only students in vocational schools have a construction site traineeship as part of their education.
      The two construction companies blame Finneca for the mix-up, as Finneca came to them with the proposal of a traineeship.
      The head of Finneca, Heidi Ignatius, claims that the students came to Finland to perform traineeships that will be counted as credit towards their degrees. According to the students themselves, this is not the case.
      Olli Sorainen from the Ministry of Labour suspects that Finneca decided to take advantage of the new labour market legislation, which allows foreign trainees to enter the country more easily than foreigners signing regular employment contracts.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Most Finnish candidates for EU Parliament open to more free movement of labour (21.5.2004)

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