(De)politicisation of Gender Equality in Finnish Competitive Corporatism

In this dissertation, I discuss Finnish competitive corporatism from the perspective of gender equality and, more specifically, pay inequality. My first research objective is to highlight how the pursuit and promotion of competitiveness in particular shapes the Finnish labour market system in gendered ways; secondly, I seek to analyse how gender-related labour market conflicts in turn shape the labour market system. I approach these themes through the concepts of politicisation and depoliticisation. By the concept of politicisation, I mean those means by which various phenomena or issues are positioned as politically salient topics and, for example, support for the different policies that could influence those topics. By the concept of depoliticisation, I refer to practices that seek to limit the field of political decision- making or construe different phenomena as non-political. I am particularly interested in the politicisation and depoliticisation of gender and wages.

My research context is the competitive corporatist system in Finland, in which labour market parties – i.e. the trade unions and employers' organisations – have significant decision-making power through negotiations with the state. I also study the recent transformation of this corporatist system, which has seen major decentralisation in recent years.

I argue that corporatism in Finland has been mainly dominated by the interests of export industries, which have become representatives of national competitiveness and economic growth. Consequently, competitiveness is typically equated with the efficiency and labour costs of the export sector, the level of which must be monitored and managed to maintain competitiveness. In Finland, competitiveness has been upheld by both centralised collective agreements and more recently through the implementation of a wage norm. The aim of the wage norm is to implement wage formation in such a way that the export sector acts as an initiator of collective bargaining, and the wage increases in export industries create ceiling for wage increases in other sectors.

In my own research design, I approach competitiveness from the perspective of its gendered effects. I propose that the control of wage levels in the female-dominated public sector has become a key objective of competitive corporatism. The pursuit of competitiveness is often treated in politics as a neutral economic reality, but research on Nordic labour market models has shown that emphasising competitiveness can well lead to an active and conscious disregard for gender equality. In my research, I propose that a key element of competitiveness corporatism is maintaining wage relativities especially in the public sector and the export sector. Although this objective is not necessarily an intrinsic value in competitive corporatism, the perception of competitiveness and its elements has recently been largely limited to the efficiency and cost level of the export sector. In this case public sector pay rises may appear to be a threat to competitiveness if wage increases would result in, for example, tax increases, or if unions in other sectors considered public sector increases to set the standard for increases for everyone.

In my doctoral dissertation, I studied my topic, i.e. the politicisation and depoliticisation of the gender pay gap in competitive corporatism, through four research articles. In the first article, I have historical analysis of how the role of competitiveness in Finnish corporatism has grown during the era of income policy agreements, and how it has also narrowed the opportunities for public sector services and pay. In the second and third publications, I study the negotiations for the Competitiveness Pact of 2016, during which the gendered impacts of the Pact and related policies became a central topic, with the trade union movement opposing the government's actions. In the fourth publication, I discuss collective bargaining in the public sector in 2020 and 2022, which was marked on the one hand by the public sector unions' goal of exceeding wage increases in the export sector and, on the other, by the social and economic crisis caused by the coronavirus.

I approach my research topics through qualitative methods. In my analysis of the data I focus on, among other things, the meanings given to competitiveness, corporatism, equality and the public sector, but also on the diverse strategies by which the social partners and the state seek to promote their own goals. I have also emphasised the importance of affects or emotions for competitive corporatism, because politicisation or depoliticisation also requires some means of engaging the audience in the goals set out in them, and I argue that affects can play a central role here.

The material of my thesis mainly consists of publicly available documents. I have found such material to be ideally suited to the study of politicisation, since the aim of politicisation is influencing the public, and the communication between the labour market parties and the state strongly emphasises this dimension. However, the first publication is not an empirical study, but relies on the analysis of earlier literature. For the second article, I collected and analysed 27 parliamentary debates, which consisted of more than 400 pages. In the third article, I used the various outputs of the social partners and the state, such as blogs or more formal statements, to study the topic. There was a total of 383 of these. For the fourth article, I collected a similar dataset, which was 855 documents in size. In addition, I conducted five background interviews with the labour market parties.

In the conclusions of my thesis, I point out that gender equality and the gender pay gap can be approached very instrumentally in the labour markets. For employers' organisations and the state, the gender pay gap is a secondary issue to competitiveness, and promoting competitiveness can also justify measures that undermine equality. For example, in the negotiations on the Competitiveness Pact, competitiveness was framed through a discourse emphasising Finland's sovereignty and the stability of central government finances, whereby the public sector and the unions that opposed the Pact were positioned above all as a threat to the common good of Finland as a whole.

On the other hand, the trade union movement could use the politicisation of equality primarily for strategic reasons. For example, in the negotiations on the Competitiveness Pact, the trade union movement first criticised the government for its gendered cuts, but in its agreement with employers, it nevertheless implemented policies targeted at the public sector in a correspondingly gendered manner. The trade union movement also proposed the development of the Finnish model, i.e. the previously mentioned wage norm system, in Finland.

Other publications also reiterate the strong alliance between competitiveness and security. For example, during the recession of the 1990s, safety discourse played a significant role, and this was also the case in the collective bargaining in the public sector during the pandemic. In 2020, the pandemic was mainly considered to pose a threat to competitiveness and public finances, which is why wage increases and industrial action were considered to pose a serious threat to Finland's ability to cope with the pandemic. In 2022, however, unions reversed the situation and politicised public sector working conditions based on the pandemic. According to the unions, a greater threat than the economic crisis was the crisis of the welfare state, the consequences of which, for example due to labour shortages, would be immediately visible nationwide. By combining the rhetoric about security and gendered wage inequality, trade unions exceptionally succeeded in exceeding the wage increase policy in export sectors, which has already become an unofficial norm in Finland.

Based on my findings, I argue that labour market discourse in Finland is highly depoliticising, especially when it comes to competitiveness. Lack of competitiveness is construed as an existential threat to Finnish political autonomy and public finances, and consequently policy and wages need to adjust to the needs of the export industries. This makes bridging the gender pay gap not only a threat to competitiveness, but paradoxically even the welfare state itself.