LA 3/2023 and 4/2023.

The parliament is on a break but there are a couple of new bill proposals. Both are from SDP and are supported by SDP or Left Alliance.

LA 3/2023proposed by Timo Suhonen, is about enabling organizations to make group complaints about work-related legal disputes. This may be a good idea. Considering, that in Finland, unions make most of the worker's rights by agreements with employees, but cannot then enforce them through court is a bit weird. I do not think there would be a wave of complaints. Simple because, in Finland, court costs are added on after litigation normally. That would make unions choose the battles. I do not buy that this would help too much on non-unionized workers. If they do not want to complain to the police why would they complain to a union. How big of a problem foreign worker abuse is in Finland in the first place. There are some examples of it. One recent is Thai berry collectors. In that case, the police were just fine.

LA 4/2024, proposed by Kim Berg, is regarding the criminalization of low pay. It is not clear what this is. I think it is also to help Unions. Allegedly, unions are losing membership (couldn't find a good quick source for this). There is an amount of people outside of the union system so they would also be more affected by pay rises caused by union work. But, there are not many arguments as to why. Mostly quotes from different government officials saying something to effect that the current law is lacking. Not, really any case law to point. Some quotes do come from Vakavaan alipalkkaukseen perustuva työntekijöiden hyväksikäyttö ja siihen reagointi — Rikosoikeudellinen selvitys report. Probably the best argument, but again Kim is just quoting not saying why would I need to care. I cannot even say that the quotes which are there support the argument. Hence, without reading the report I do not know why would I care. This is a shame since there may be an actual issue here.