I was going to do a video post about this, but the camcorder had been sitting on the sidelines too long and ran out of battery half way into the post. Therefore, here’s a text version of what I wanted to say about the topic mentioned in the title of this post.

I think I’ve mentioned it a few times before in my blog as well that I’m not a big fan of labor unions and bureaucracy when it comes to employment. However, in the last year or so when we’ve had a very difficult economic situation in our country (everywhere globally to be honest) we’ve also managed to see some of the most outrageous strikes or intentions of strike as well. I’m mainly talking about Finland, but unrest regarding employment probably has picked up else where as well.

To rational and reasonable people these two things don’t go well together. When the economy is facing tough times I’d be very happy to have a job and do a little extra just to keep it. However, labor unions in my opinion don’t really allow employees to make that choice.

The main reason I dislike unions is the self prophecy that they create. They have been created in the first place to defend workers’ rights and drive improvements in working conditions generally. These days, their functions have changed dramatically from that why they were first set up to be. When the original reasons of the unions have slowly diminished as countries have become more civilised, they have had to come up with more extreme reasons to justify their existence.

Becoming more extreme of course does not help any situation, whatever it may be. Secondly, these situations are usually in the manner of either/or rather than finding a solution half way. While I don’t want to sound extreme myself, I believe a lot of the stiffness of our economy is due to the labor unions and hence in bad times, many people indirectly suffer in the form of unemployment.

There seems to be a very deeply knit (false) truth somewhere in the Finnish society that workers and entrepreneurs have to watch out for their rights at all times as both parties are constantly trying to take advantage of each other. This couldn’t be more false. At least in the more creative industries, if you are good – nobody wants to let go of you. Companies try to hang on to their talent, ie. people, as hard as possible because they know they are the key to success.

In many of the more traditional industries employment is still, sadly, taken for granted. I believe that being able to work, while it is everyone’s right, has to be earned. Why? Companies don’t take their business for granted, they have to earn loyalty and trust from consumers to be able to charge for things they sell. This earning of trust and loyalty should be passed down to employees as well to some degree.

To conclude, I understand there are a lot of people that would criticise my view of life on this matter. All I can really offer to them is that there are always two ways to employ yourself, find someone to pay you salary or earn your own salary in the form of an entrepreneur. Nobody is stopping you from starting your own company and being your own boss.