Comment: The fired building superintendent, who got laid off because clients complained of his ethnic background, has been rehired by his former employer Salon Omakotiyhdistys ry, according to HS.fi quoting Finnish News Agency (STT).
The moral of the incident? If you expose discrimination and racism things may change.
Keeping quiet if you are a victim of discrimination and racism is as bad as working in the black. In both cases you forfeit your rights and leave your future to chance.
Another encouraging matter about the incident shows that things can change for the better in Finland but there is one key requirement: Silence is a definite no-no.
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STT
Turku. Salossa irtisanottu ulkomaalaistaustainen talonmies palaa takaisin töihin. Salon omakotiyhdistys pyysi aiemmin miestä palaamaan, ja hän kertoi perjantaina tulevansa takaisin.
If I was that man, I would most certainly not go back to work there. The environment there is just be too counterproductive with all of that hatred floating around.Really, how can he be expected to do his best, when he knows from the start that the cards are stacked against him?
These residents certainly did not have a change of heart, and so they still disapprove of him doing the job. The one thing I know about Finns, is that they are very smart. I see 2 possible scenarios:
1) the company which re-hired him will soon find another reason (one not related to ethnicity) to terminate his employment.
2) the residents will start accusing him of wrongdoing. For example some little old lady might claim that he spies on her when she is in the bathroom,or there might suddenly be numerous bogus claims of lost (read stolen) property.
Of course, people are different, but in his shoes, I would proceed with my legal battle against the firm.This I think would be the better option since it would do a lot more for race relations here in Finland, than returning to work ever could.It would also bring badly needed press coverage on the extreme racism here in Finland.
Finland needs to be exposed. On paper, Finland seems like a wonderful place for immigrants,with all of their written integration policies etc. But paper is not reality, and the reality of the situation needs to be made known to the outside world.
No, I am not asking this man to be the sacrificial lamb, since in my daily life here, I have had several Rosa Parks moments. I leave no stone unturned when I feel I am treated unfairly. More immigrants should do the same, and not be afraid to demand fair treatment.
This is excellent news!
Unfortunately most cases of racial and ethnic discrimination in the job market are harder to prove.
I’m really sick of opportunistic PS politicians using disgusting language to paint all “immigrants” or perceived “ethnic” groups with the same big brush. There’s a HUGE difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant and these differences are mostly reflected in education and employment statistics. Hakkarainen and his ilk should take a good look at the facts before condemning all black people as a group for example. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Ethiopians and South Africans for example have on average much higher education and lower unemployment than “white” Italians, Americans, Poles, British, Swedes, Ukrainians, Latvians and Norwegians.
The challenges faced by recent refugees whether from Myanmar, Somalia or Sudan are similar and it usually takes a generation before the children of refugees become normalized members of any society. If we truly want to learn from other societies then the worst we can do is demonize them and force them into ethnic ghettos like Germany and Poland did to Jews or USA did to black people.
Foreigner wrote: “Finland needs to be exposed. On paper, Finland seems like a wonderful place for immigrants,with all of their written integration policies etc. But paper is not reality, and the reality of the situation needs to be made known to the outside world.”
Couldn’t agree more.
I have been contributing to that. I am not great in any language in particular but I can tell the story about my dealings in finland in portuguese, english, german, french and spanish. That is what I have been doing. I don’t know how many people have heard my story, but they should be quite a lot by now. I have told it in airports, at work in England and to my friends there and here where I live now. I have many friends and acquaintances from quite a few different countries. Everybody I know has by now a pretty good picture of how Finland treats foreigners. The PS election result in finland only adds credibility to my story. A nationalistic party, basing it’s campaign on xenophobia and anti-immigration comes close to win the elections in there.
I think that you are right. How can that man stay in the job? I think that finns have cunning ways to conceal racism and unfair treatment. It is very very hard to make a case or complain there. Little self regulation.
One example of how it can be done: Legally they take complaints. In practice there isn’t enough staff to take them and the service is completely inefficient to say the least. For the kind of complaint I wanted to submit I got the answer that it would take at least one year and a half to process. The lady said that they were understaffed. I told the lady that I was sorry for her, to have so much stress, but I thought that they were understaffed because not enough resources have been allocated to deal with this type of problems and that, in my opinion, this situation was created deliberately.
As I keep pointing out, the employer in this case is not a company that seeks to sell services to an open market, but an association that arranges a facility solely for its members. These members have the option of declining to use this facility or of transferring their membership to another association, although the local character of these homeowner associations tends to place some limitations on this choice. It is easier to motivate a lobbying group to act on behalf of several residents in a village than to act on behalf of one resident from another village where the association has very few members. As the member also pays the travelling expenses of the oddjob man, it is also more expensive to use the services of an association based in another area.
Effectively the racists can choose between shovelling their own snow or joining another association and paying more to have it shovelled by the oddjob man from another village.
The responses above seem to imply that there is a better option for the oddjob man in this case than continuing to work for the association. I’m not sure that this is true, at least in any financial sense or in terms of securing some just satisfaction through a separate procedure.
The employment was terminated by serving notice, and this termination was then retracted before the period of notice had ended. This means that the employee suffered no financial loss. There is no basis for a claim of unfair dismissal, as no dismissal occurred. Similarly there is no basis for reporting any criminal offence in the case, as there is no material outcome of discrimination. As far as I can see, there is no such offence as attempted work-related discrimination, so this material outcome is an essential condition of prosecution.
It is rather more likely, in my opinion, that the members of the association will show greater than usual interest in using this particular service. This case has also created a sufficiently large groundswell of public interest to ensure that any further harassment of this employee will be examined in considerable detail. Assuming that the guy is not a total duffer, I’d say his job is quite safe.