I’ve written quite extensively of trade unions in the past and my dislike for how they run things. PAM or the Service Union United has come out publicly to question the right of shops to be open today, the 6th of January also known as Epiphany. Today was a public holiday, but many stores kept their doors open.
Today happens to also mark the last days of the Russian new year. It’s also a time when hundreds of thousands of Russians have come to Finland to spend their money, even more so than traveling to any other country.
The government has given some special licenses to stores to allow them to keep stores open on a public holiday.
For the sake of their members, the trade union questions the right to keep the stores open on a public holiday. This is highly questionable.
I believe it’d be in their members’ interest to keep shops selling as much as they can. Our economy cannot survive without the private sector, but it can survive without obnoxious trade unions.
Employees also get paid very well on public holidays and I can only imagine that quite a few people wanted to take advantage of this double pay for today.
Unions should seriously rethink their positions on how they not only portray themselves, but also how they view the economy. It doesn’t seem credible anymore and it’s only a matter of time they’ll follow the footsteps of the music industry.
The unions have to become more pro-entrepreneurial to succeed (although I don’t see any reason why they should, succeed that is).
