Cutting jobs in Finland was the easy option for Nokia, as other countries have better managed to safeguard employees, a trade-union head has claimed.
Pertti Porokari, president of the Union of Professional Engineers, told Yle on Friday that Nokia’s plans to axe 1,300 jobs in Finland is a sign of weak legislation and the strong influence of the French government over the company.
On Wednesday the mobile networks giant Nokia announced that it would be making savings of almost 1 billion euros to its global operations, following its acquisition of the French-American Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion euros. The firm said it would be looking to cut its workforce in Finland by 1,300 before 2018. At the end of last year the company employed some 6,700 workers in Finland.
So far Nokia has refused to give a detailed run-down of where else in the world it will be axing jobs, although it has emerged that 400 posts are expected to go in France. However the company expects to offset those with the creation of 500 new jobs in the country.
French workers protected
Porokari’s comments come in the wake of claims printed in Helsingin Sanomat on Friday that the French government made it a prerequisite of the acquisition that the 4,200 jobs based in France would be protected. As a result, the paper claims, the company is cutting significantly more workers in Finland than from its French operations.
A source present at the negotiations tells the paper that had Nokia not promised to keep French jobs, the French government and major French shareholders would have stopped the sale going through. The paper says that Nokia’s CEO Rajiv Suri twice met with French President Francois Hollande, including in Paris one year ago.
Easy to lay off staff
Employee groups in Finland are seizing on the development as a rebuttal to repeated claims by Finland’s government that Finnish labour laws need to be made more flexible in order to boost competitiveness. Porokari told Yle on Friday that, contrary to what is often claimed, the proposed Nokia job cuts prove that it is far easier to lay off workers in Finland than in some other European countries.
Nokia, which has for years been struggling to regain its former dominance of the communications sector, hopes the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition will prove a significant boost to its competitiveness.