Inflation requires higher wages

According to the committee that follows the development of income and expenses in Finland, the economic growth in Finland will head up over four percent of what it was last year. The committee’s judgment is that there will be growth in economy (in Finnish, talous) during this year and next, even tough there are differences between the different field of industries.

The growth of economy will facilitate from the domestic demands, when the private consumption and investments will grow. The export will grow also, but the fastest growth stage is over already.

The concern of employees is that the wages are not following the growth of expenses. It has been estimated that next year the growth of expenses will be 2,7 percent – and this estimate do not include the option of raising the incident taxes, which would accelerate the elevation of prices even more. More accurate estimate would be that at next year the expenses will raise three percent.

The reason for the inflation now is mainly the raise of energy and food prices. Most of this is due to the international situation, for example the consequence of oil pricing and food getting ore expensive due to the larger consumption level, but some parts of uprising prices come from domestic actions, like the raises of different taxes.

The Finnish Confederation of Professionals STTK, one of the three trade union confederations (in Finnish, ay-liike) in Finland, sees that when expenses are getting higher, the wages of employees should follow. At the moment the competitive edge of Finnish companies is high, which gives the possibility to raise wages.

The need of raising wages puts extra pressure for the negation of collective terms of work at autumn 2011. In order to interfere with even bigger regression the wage earning persons (in Finnish, palkansaaja) should be kept with a high purchasing power.

There are estimates also that the unemployment rate in Finland will get smaller during the next two years. However there are lots of long term unemployed, whose possibilities to get back to the working life are getting smaller and smaller. For this group of people actions should be planned actively, especially for those under 30 years of old.