Authors

• Ministry of Labour
• Statistics Finland

Keywords

employees, equality between the sexes, job characteristics, job security, personnel management, personnel policy, wages, workers participation, working conditions, workloads

Abstract

The survey studied employee opinion on the quality of working life in Finland. Main themes were job characteristics, work environment, conflicts at the workplace, influence over decisions, working hours, wages, employment security and equality. The year 1995 survey contained new questions on team work and employee ideas for improvement.

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 and the proportion of women at the workplace, what kind of changes there had been in staff numbers, working hours and contracts over the past 12 months, and whether people had been transferred to other units. Further questions covered team work at the workplace, whether there had been conflicts at the workplace, between what groups and whether the conflicts had decreased or increased over the past 12 months. Employee influence over, for instance, workload and tasks, and changes in the degree of incfluence were investigated as well as trade union influence and R's membership in a trade union or a professional association.

Next set of questions covered overtime at work, overtime compensation, job characteristics, and changes over the past year in workload, physical or mental stress, in access to training etc. Wage level and pay systems were charted. One topic pertained to whether the respondents had presented any ideas to improve working conditions, products, services or working methods at the workplace and how the ideas had been received. 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, the financial situation of their organisation. Some questions focused on equality between men and women at the workplace, the gender of colleagues, persons who supervised the respondents or whom they surpervised, and whether men had been favoured and women discriminated against in pay, access to training, dismissal, career advancement or in getting support from the supervisor. Incidents of sexual harassment were charted.

Background variables included the respondent's gender, age, year of birth, degree of 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 1995 telephone interviews.