Disadvantages faced by immigrants in working life – difficult to check employment contract and wage slip due to language barrier
Immigrants working in the cleaning sector in the Tampere region have difficulties in understanding their employment contracts and employment conditions. These problems have come to light in PAM’s customer service, in employee interviews and in information received from shop stewards. Among other issues, employees find it difficult to check their wage slips because the language barrier makes them almost impossible to understand.
Elisa Penders, PAM’s regional manager for Pirkanmaa, finds the situation disturbing and stresses that it would be important for employers to provide employment contracts and wage slips in a language workers understand. She points out that it is in everyone’s interest that workplaces do not develop two-tier systems and that all employees should be equally aware of their employment conditions.
- Language barriers are there to be broken. We know that some employers have ready-made employment contract templates in English, but for some unknown reason they have not been used with employees. Introducing the right sort of contract templates would reduce misunderstandings and improve the position of employees, recommends Penders.
- Unfortunately immigrants have also experienced intimidation from their supervisors about belonging to a trade union. Shortcomings have also been encountered in workers’ induction training. Employers have systematically failed to tell about shop stewards and occupational health and safety delegates. This does not promote an atmosphere of trust, Penders states.
The Tampere regional office of Service Union United PAM has studied immigrants’ experiences in working life and what services they need from a trade union. Information has been gathered in customer service situations and from interviews of seven cleaning sector workers with immigrant backgrounds during May.
The interviews were performed by Joonas Kumpulainen, who is studying at the University of Tampere. He says that the main disadvantage that has come to light affecting workers in the cleaning sector with an immigrant background is challenges in understanding documents due to a lack of Finnish language skills.
- It emerged in the interviews that immigrants rarely get employment contracts, wage slips or holiday pay statements in a language they understand. The language barrier means that immigrants don’t understand their employment conditions and can more easily fall prey to abuse, Kumpulainen says.
- In the discussions, specific cases also came up of workers not being paid enough salary and not being able to check their wage slips because of the language barrier, Kumpulainen says.
News item first published in Finnish on 2 June 2017.