Tekijät

• Ministry of Labour
• Statistics Finland

Asiasanat

autonomy at work, discrimination, employees, job characteristics, job security, job security, personnel management, personnel policy, telework, wages, working conditions, workloads

Sisällön kuvaus

The annual 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 2000 survey contained new questions on discrimination, capacity to work, and immigrant co-workers.

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, what kind of changes there had been in staff numbers, working hours, contracts and organisational structure over the past 12 months, and whether people had been transferred to other units. Further questions covered team work, and whether there had been conflicts at the workplace, between what groups and whether the conflicts had decreased or increased over the past 12 months. Staff qualifications and requirements, employee influence over, for instance, workload and tasks, and changes in the degree of influence 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, 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 whether there had been other development initiatives. 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. A number of questions investigated how the employees' capacity to work and occupational health and safety had been taken into account at the workplace, the respondents' sickness absences, and estimate of own mental and physical capacity to work. Discrimination at work based on ethnic group, age or gender was explored as well as experiences of immigrant co-workers. Finally, the respondents were asked whether they had done work from home or somewhere else outside of workplace (telework).

Background variables included the respondent's gender, age, degree of urbanisation of the municipality of residence, region, occupational group, status in employment, industry of employment, employer type, weekly working hours, additional jobs, industry of additional job, and basic and vocational education. Most background variables were obtained from the Labour Force Survey 2000 telephone interviews.