Center | Kaikkonen starts pushing more for wage earners – This is what the centrist conkers comment

Center has not taken the side of wage earners enough in recent years, said the party chairman Antti Kaikkonen In an interview with HS on Saturday.

“In the future, we have reason to show more interest than before in the issues of the wage earner side as well. We have been silent about them in recent history,” Kaikkonen said.

According to Kaikkonen, the center has strongly defended small entrepreneurs in recent years, which he says the center also needs to continue. At the same time, however, the wage earners’ questions have been left unanswered.

Former prime minister and former chairman of the centre Matti Vanhanen says that for him it’s partly about “visuals”. In other words, the issues of wage earners are indeed important to the party, but in the last government term, the center profiled itself as a defender of entrepreneurs within the government.

“In the government cooperation with the Left Alliance and Sdp, the wage earners’ point of view was very strongly present, and our task within the government was to keep the situation of entrepreneurs stable. It was also visible on the outside,” says Vanhanen.

Now the center is in the opposition, and in many ways the government is making pro-entrepreneurial policies.

“In this situation, the issues of wage earners naturally come to the fore more, and there is now a reason for that.”

Another central figure, former member of parliament and minister Sirkka-Liisa Anttila says that he likes Kaikonen’s opening.

“He talks about it. Of course, wage earners must be as central to us as other groups.”

Center was the prime minister’s party in 2015–2019, Juha Sipilä during the presidency. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, popularity collapsed, and the center lost 18 seats in parliament.

The popularity did not start to rise in the last election period, when the center was in the government with the Sdp, the Left Alliance, the Greens and the Rkp. In last year’s parliamentary elections, the center lost more seats.

Anttila’s however, the reason for the drop in support is not that the center has taken the side of wage earners too little. Rather, the center should have fought even more strongly against the red-green image in the last government, says Anttila.

“Our biggest problem has been that in the last term of government we were branded as a green-left party. There was no way we would have more visibly defended centrist values ​​and ideas,” says Anttila.

According to Anttila, the center should have much more clearly disclosed in public the reasons why certain kinds of compromises were reached. It should have been clearly stated what the center’s negotiation goals were in each situation, and what was achieved from them.

“People are most interested in how different solutions have been arrived at, and what each party has been through. People like to be told what the disagreements and crisis points were in the negotiations, because then they can understand what each party is pushing for. These should have been much more courageously opened.”

What becomes the position of wage earners, according to the center’s Anttila, the culture of agreement between the labor market parties must be defended.

The government is making several reforms to the labor market, one of which is the strengthening of the so-called export model through law. In the model, salary increases for workers in the export industry also set the ceiling for increases in other sectors.

In practice, the government intends to regulate how the national mediator should act when giving settlement proposals. The mediator should take into account the functioning of wage formation and the labor market.

“These are exactly the things that should be agreed upon between the labor market parties. Flexibility is needed in the labor market, because Finland is an export-driven country, but it must be done by mutual agreement. Now the government is aligning things too sharply, and it only leads to a stalemate that does not benefit either party.”

Part The government’s labor market reforms are also favorable to the center.

The center has traditionally supported increasing local agreements, says Matti Vanhanen.

“But we have emphasized that the negotiation arrangement should be equal. Neither party should be given the wrong kind of blackmail opportunity,” he says.

In Vanhanen’s opinion, one of the most problematic proposals of the current government is the plan to cut 100 million euros from vocational training. That also weakens the position of wage earners in society, he says.

“It creates unfair treatment between vocational school students and high school students. I hope that the center intervenes strongly in this.”

Vanhanen is also worried about the changes in education policy, which threaten to make it difficult to switch fields. This is, for example, the one-place rule, according to which a university student cannot have two study places of the same level valid at the same time.

According to Vanhanen, the proposal that the center must “absolutely oppose” is the so-called one aimed at immigrants the three-month rule. According to the proposal, an unemployed immigrant should leave Finland if he cannot find a new job within three months. For special experts, the time limit would be six months.

“It is a very harmful presentation for the Finnish economy. The main attention should be paid to that.”