FRANCE / FINLAND Finnish workers fight austerity
SOME 40,000 people filled Senate Square outside the
Finnish parllament on Thursday October 3, 1991. Their demonstration was a reaction to a government austerity programme unprecedented In Finland's history. The protest was also historic in that the four Finnish trade union confederations, organizing both blue and white collar workers, held a Joint rally for the first time. PETER LINDGREN
T HE governing bourgeois coalition worked out the austerity programme in cooperation with the employers' organization. The new budget is part of a plan whose main element is a 10% cut in workers' wages. The other proposal from the employers' organization — accepted by the government - is for a 50 hours a year increase in working time without compensation.
Before the trade union demonstration the Finnish minister of finance, Viinanen, appealed to the workers to leave their unions. Also included in the package are laws prohibiting strikes in key sectors of the economy, and a change in the law which currently makes collective wage agreements binding on all the employers concerned. The aim of this latter measure is to make it possible for individual employers to do even "better" than the main proposal for a 10% cut in wages where the local relation of forces permits.
Pea soup and hard bread
Workers came to the demonstration from all over Finland in trains and buses. In the square they were symbolically served with pea soup and hard bread without butter. The main slogan, taken up spontaneously by the demonstrators, was "work! work! work!". Unemployment in Finland is now touching 10% and it is estimated that the unemployment fund will be empty by November. The government is also proposing that the trade union members rather than the government fill the empty funds.
All categories of working people came to the demonstration, including pensioners. The government's budget plans include stopping the index-linking of pensions in line with inflation. Public sector workers have a special reason to oppose the government plans, since there is a proposal to lay off 700,000 public employees for two weeks next summer.
The leader of the Finnish LO federation, Lauri Ihalainen, got the loudest applause from the crowds when he attacked the government. "They are trying to attack the workers and not the economic depression. Their hostile attitude to the trade unions has led the bosses to raise impossible demands."
Ihalainen described the trade union demands as "extremely modest". Nor is he wrong; the trade union paper The WageEarner proposes the prolongation of already existing contracts, and Ihalaine himself says that almost all trade union leaders agree that there must be a cut in real wages.
Split in bourgeois coalition
Already on the day of the demonstration a small split could be seen in the bourgeois coalition. A special decision on new taxes on travel was postponed and on Friday three of the trade union leaders that had spoken at the demonstration decided not to go on a trip to Malta which had been criticized by many as an attempt to bribe them. While many of the demonstrators I talked to were thinking in terms of a general strike, many of the trade union leaders are hoping for a contract to be agreed next month.
However, there has been no sign of concessions from the employers' organization. They argue that Finland is in a worse recession than any other industrialized country. A drop of the share of the Soviet Union in Finland's exports from 45 to 5% has rubbed salt in the wounds of the recession. In projections for 1991, Finland ends up in last place among industrialized countries in terms of GNP, production prices, stock market index and private consumption.
Meanwhile, one of many financial scandals is throwing sand into the employers' propaganda machine. The Finnish central bank has been forced to pump in several billion Finnish marks [I billion Finnish marks = $200 million] from the state budget to save a small bank from bankruptcy and prevent the collapse of the financial 19 system. Such scandals are one result of the