An employee at their workstation in Helsinki on 17 April 2024. The Finnish government on Monday unveiled a bill designed to make it easier to lay off employees and, thereby, to promote hiring and employee turnover. (Emmi Korhonen – Lehtikuva)
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THE GOVERNMENT of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) is intent on relaxing the legal requirements for terminating employees.
On Monday, the government opened a public comment period for a bill that would amend the legal grounds for terminating an employment from “proper and weighty” to “proper” for terminations carried out for other than financial or operational reasons.
Proper grounds would include neglect of work duties – such as unjustified absences, inappropriate conduct, negligence at the workplace – long-standing employee-related underperformance and employee-related changes in the conditions for working that prevent them from performing their duties.
Grounds such as disability or illness would remain improper grounds for termination.
While the bill stipulates that employees must not be laid off unless they have been offered an opportunity to rectify their conduct, it also states that employers need not issue such a notice in circumstances where the employee should have recognised the seriousness and reprehensible nature of their conduct.
The bill would also do away with the employer requirement to explore the possibility of re-assignment as an alternative to termination, except for circumstances where the conditions for working have changed during the course of the employment relationship.
The government outlined in its request for comments that, going forward, the key would be to assess whether employers can reasonably be required to continue the employment relationship beyond the notice period. The objective of the bill is to remove obstacles to hiring, improve the operational preconditions of small and medium-sized enterprises and encourage employee turnover without “unjustifiably undermining” the protection against unjustified termination.
The bill drew immediate criticism from opposition lawmakers and trade union representatives.
Katariina Sahlberg, a lawyer at the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK), viewed that the bill is confusing.
“If the bill is passed into law as is, Finland’s roughly 2.1 million wage earners will live in uncertainty for many years about where the threshold for termination will actually be,” she cautioned in a press release on Monday.
Seppo Koskinen, a professor emeritus of labour law at the University of Turku, described the revisions forwarded in the bill as vague and significant, estimating that they would not cause a major shift in jurisprudence.
“It feels like even though the intention is to lower the termination threshold, the government wasn’t able to lay out in concrete terms where the threshold will be lower,” he analysed in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
