The news service is sponsored bySAK, the largest central tradeunion in Finland, and eleven of its 24 affiliated unions. Anja Lamberg is a mechanic who assembles frequency transformers. She earns much more than a mechanic in Asia. However, her weekly working hours at the ABB factory in Helsinki are shorter than those in Far-East industrial plants. Since the Asian devaluation spiral one might think that transferring production from Finland to cheap labour countries would be more profitable than ever.
Finnish companies disagree.
It is the production model that makes the difference between a cheap labour country and Finland. On an Asian assembly line women sit side by side performing work divided into short stages. In Finland there are often production cells made up of multi-skilled employees. The cell assembles the product from beginning to end according to the customer's order. According to Juhani Pylkk nen, a technology director in the same company, independent work teams function poorly in low-income countries because of differing educational levels and working culture.