The Central Party launched its regional election campaign on Monday and said it wanted a takeover of the majority of the new regional authorities.
According to a recent study, enthusiasm for the election may be low, but for the center, it is a happy event.
The party has long supported a new layer of elected government, and it finally got its wish through new meetings set up to oversee health and social services regionally.
Evening News reports that party leader Annika Saarikko his party’s goal was to ensure that every municipality maintained a health center, even if cost-cutting and streamlining of services increased.
This pressure is likely to be on small rural communities seeking to elect a large number of Central Party commissioners, so his party has more skin than most.
"The last experience of the new elections in Finland was related to the EU elections about twenty years ago," said Saarikko. "Now, in the same way, a new electoral culture is being created, and we are encouraging people to vote. If the problem with the EU elections was that things seemed distant, now we are very close to people’s everyday things."
Strike warning
Evening paper carry a warning industrial activities that could disrupt the export industry this winter. The problem is in an industry where negotiations on a new collective agreement have not even begun.
The employers’ organization in the technology industry has said that its members now have the opportunity to join the new organization to negotiate a sectoral agreement or negotiate by workplace.
Only 391 companies have committed to collective bargaining, and the remaining 1,600 companies in the association prefer to negotiate locally.
This means that there will soon be a situation where workers are no longer covered by a collective agreement and can legally strike to improve their conditions. Employers can also invite lockouts as part of their negotiation strategy.
If employers and trade unions representing more than half of the workers in the sector agree on the agreement, it will also be considered binding on companies that were not involved in the negotiations. This has been the case in practice for the majority of the Finnish workforce, but the situation seems to be changing.
A protracted industrial dispute may lead to a more unequal Finland, where a general increase in annual wages will play a smaller role in reducing income disparities.
It is part of the plan, according to Iltalehti, employers’ organizations and influential right-wing thinkers have suggested in recent years that binding agreements and general wage standards should be called into question.
Housing prices high
On Monday, the Finnish National Association of Real Estate Agents published a forecast that the housing market will continue to rise for a long time.
Helsingin sanomat newspaper reports that agents do not see downward pressure on prices, and the shortage of new, larger properties is making life difficult for buyers in many areas.
However, the association said some sellers had raised asking prices too much, and this led to them having to wait longer to sell their property.
Source: The Nordic Page