General legal provisions on employment and labour contracts (Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, 2019) provide journalists with permanent contracts. Like any other occupational group, they enjoy a strong degree of protection against dismissal because of personal convictions or any other arbitrary reason. In the case of the termination of an individual’s contract, their employer is obliged to demonstrate a financial or production-related reason for it. Dismissal must be preceded by a period of notice, preventing arbitrary firing. The Finnish collective employment contracts between the employer’s unions and trade unions are extensive, and the terms of employment are generally complied with. The most recent collective contract representing journalists has been negotiated between the Finnish Media Federation (the employers’ union) and UJF for the period 2020–2022.
UJF aims to improve the financial and professional positions of its members and their work conditions, and to supervise their interests at the levels of both collective bargaining and individual organisations.[i] Over the years, the union has taken several dismissal cases to court, which have generally been ruled in favour of the journalists, awarding compensations or damages for undue dismissal. According to the interviews, a professional practice of allowing journalists to decline to write against their personal convictions has a solid foundation in Finnish journalistic culture – this is strictly followed in the news media. This principle is also stipulated in the journalists’ collective contract (Federation of Finnish Media Industry & Journalists Union, 2020: 15, para. 2.7).
In the 2010s, about 200 journalists’ jobs have been lost on a yearly basis from just newspapers because of both digitalisation and the economic downturn (Grundström, 2020). In addition, the proportion of freelancers has declined, currently comprising around 10 per cent of UJF’s members. The use of short-term contracting varies between media sectors, but in general, short-term contracts, internships, or freelance contracts are still the primary way of gaining entry into the profession. As one respondent remarked, because of relatively high unemployment among journalists, there is no particular shortage of a temporary workforce, which has allowed employers to downgrade their earnings:
Yle is in a class of its own when it comes to [the amount of] part time jobs. The organisation is too large. The organisation should let the managers in the “lower- tiers” have more freedom to make arrangements. In the commercial media organisations, the situation is different, often when someone is on maternity leave there are older professionals hired to take their place, at a much lower salary; this is the nasty outcome. It is perfectly legal but a mockery of people’s professionalism. (anonymous, 2020)
According to UJF, the unemployment rate among journalists is currently about 7.5 per cent, although many who have lost their jobs and later become freelancers and do not show up in this statistic (Honkonen, 2017).
[i] https://journalistiliitto.fi/fi/
