Authors

• Ministry of Labour
• Statistics Finland

Keywords

arrangement of working time, autonomy at work, employees, equality between the sexes, job characteristics, personnel management, personnel policy, telework, wages, working conditions, workloads

Abstract

The survey studied employee opinion on the quality of working life in Finland. Main themes were job characteristics, conflicts at the workplace, working hours, flexibility, pay systems, employment security, equality and teleworking. The year 1994 survey contained new questions on working time and equality between men and women at the workplace.

First, the respondents were asked how many years they had worked for the employer they were working for at the time, type of contract, number of persons at the workplace, and what kind of changes there had been in staff numbers, working hours, contracts, and tasks during the past 12 months, and whether people had been transferred to other units. Further questions covered incidents of violence, whether there had been conflicts at the workplace, between what groups and whether the conflicts had decreased or increased over the past 12 months. A number of questions surveyed whether men had been favoured and women discriminated against at the workplace (e.g. in pay, access to training or information).

Next set of questions investigated the respondent's autonomy at work and other job characteristics, changes over the past year, working hours, working time, flexibility in hours and time, overtime compensation, R's membership in a trade union or professional association, workload and pay systems. They were asked how likely it was that they would be dismissed or laid off, or their tasks or working hours would be changed over the next year.

Opinions were charted on employment situation in Finland and what kind of changes were happening in working life in, for instance, relating to management style, possibility to influence decisions at the workplace. Some questions focused on teleworking (working from home or elsewhere outside of office, homeworking).

Background variables included the respondent's gender, age, urbanity of the municipality of residence, region, occupational group, status in employment, industry of employment, employer type, economic activity, weekly working hours, additional jobs, industry of additional job, basic and vocational education, marital status, and the number and ages of children in the household. Most background variables were obtained from the Labour Force Survey 1994 telephone interviews.