Fun fact, when he mentions how the poorest are mostly in debt, the debt is typically caused by healthcare bills, rents and other mandatory payments that people cannot afford to pay. Basic social security level in Finland is so low that a human rights organization has given a notice about it to Finland three times in a row. At the same time, healthcare fees are some of the highest in the world. Contrary to what is often known about our "free healthcare", it's not free, it's very expensive and the main reason for the debt of the poors.
The credit system in Finland is such that if someone has a mark on it, unpaid bills or debt, it prevents you from getting housing, loans and even basic services like home insurance, car insurance, a bank account, a phone service, electricity etc. completely. The mark used to last for years and would shut people pretty much fully out of society and it still does that, getting housing without clean credit is nearly impossible for example.
What is often then demanded from the very poorest is a sort of bond payment for the service that they are deemed unrealiable to get due to bad credit. Obviously nobody can pay a 400€ bond payment just to get electricity in their home if their entire monthly income is already only about 500€. Therefore these people are completely screwed no matter what.
Then if by miracle someone with bad credit like this gets a job, there is a system where most of their income gets deducted to pay the debt and this can't be avoided. So they often again can't pay for their basic needs, but also can't get credit due to bad credit.
Often these debts are things like 50-100€ healthcare bills that go to be collected into private debt firms that add huge sums of processing fees to them. The court also adds more fees to them. Once a small bill like this is unpaid, it trasfers into a debt worth hundreds. A poor family for example often is forced to skip paying these or daycare fees to feed their kids and all of these are the true debt of the poors. If you get caught travelling on the tram without a ticket, you get a 80€ fine for it and these mostly end up turning into debt as well, because the people using the tram without a ticket are often poor.
Point being that poor people don't have any consumer debt, because nobody can get those without a steady wage income. It's all this other mandatory stuff.
It's a vile system through and through. I've been in that situation myself for 20 years, due to an unpaid student loan and having been financially scammed as a young adult. I am now free from if, only thanks to help from loved ones, but will never be able to own anything because I don't have time to earn enough for that before I run out of worklife.
I work with people who are all in this situation. The main issue with getting housing for poor or homeless here is this bad credit, not a single landlord will even consider someone who has a marking in their credit and often the marking is from something like a bill from a dentist and just spirals out of control from there. As soon as these bills move to a credit firm they rise beyond anything a poor person could hope to pay. To levels beyond their income. It's a carceral system that keeps people in misery, by design.
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 1w
Here's info on the state of social security in Finland: link
The European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) stated in its decision published on 15 February 2023 that the level of Finland's social security is still too low. The complaint filed in 2018 targeted the minimum level of several different social security and social assistance benefits. The ECSR has already given a similar decision regarding Finland.
The Finnish government is stated to take this seriously, this was posted in 2023. Lol
They've taken it so seriously that most of these already very low benefits have been severely cut in the last two years and more cuts are planned. All in order to pay for the reduction in the corporate tax mentioned in the video for example.
Such Nordic social-democracy
7
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 1w
Forgot to mention inflation and food prices and our extremely high VAT. Due to the high VAT a pretty large amount of taxes are already disproportionally paid for by the proletarians and the poorest in society.
Grocery stores and other basic manufacturing fields like mills and bakeries have been heavy monopolies in Finland for a very long time now and due to this there are only two or three chains of any one thing, mostly all owned by foreign capital or old capitalist families (previously feudal). This is how you get very high consumer pricing across the board.
Using the last 6 years as an excuse the capitalists have inflated the prices of everything to levels nobody can afford anymore. The benefits and wages meanwhile are going down or stagnating.
In 2020 you could do a trip to the store to feed a family of four for a week for about half of the funds it takes now, this is my own assesment.
It's getting very ripe in here, even the labor aristros are feeling the pain. During Marins pm years they were still given subsidies to keep quiet in the form of help in electricity bills. During the current government though, even my well paid relatives have stopped spending and moan about the cost of living daily.
7
ComradeSharkfucker - 1w
Is this a new thing? I haven't heard this sort of thing about finland until very recently. How much has the finnish economy changed for workers in the past like 20 years? I saw your comment mentioning that it started to get worse after 2020, assumedly the bourgeois took advantage of the covid crisis, but was it already on such a downward trajectory?
6
StillNoLeftLeft [none/use name, she/her] - 1w
It's not new. It got pretty bad right after the fall of the Soviet Union when we got introduced to shock therapy lite aka the depression which resulted in Finland losing it's currency and signing up for IMF austerity and privatization. The push by the bourgeoisie for this was never supressed, the finlandization propaganda, the rise of the far right from the 90s are all tied to this. So many lost their lifelihoods then and are in poverty to this day, many generationally. My family is one of these. It has just gotten progressively worse ever since.
We got the breadlines going in the 90s, today they go around blocks and for example families with children commonly need food aid, of which there isn't enough. It was the right wing governments at the time who from the 80s had started the push for "dismantling the bloated welfare state and universalism". Nato co-operation and joining the EU followed, both of which fucked us royally and still do. Public services have been meticulously eroded ever since. The payments were introduced into healthcare in 1992 and today they also include payments like payments for social services for the people who are in the most precarious positions. A homeless person has to pay for a housing service. Healtcare was fully free for a short while, but it didn't last long.
Public schooling and education has gone down the toilet. I was in school during this breaking down of the system and went from having books to erasing the same books for the next years students and not getting even a free pencil from school within years. Today the classes are huge, the admin is unbearable for the teacher, there are no longer special ed workers in classrooms, school cafeterias have lost their cooks, there are no services in school etc. All of this was previously provided. Students live on loans and this has been the case for decades.
Work is often precarious and apart from male dominated export fields most have a patchy work history. Lots of care work and service work that is outsourced to cheaper labor. The manufacturers have moved to cheap Eastern European countries and also Russia to exploit labor there and for example most of construction has been done by Estonians since the 90s as they accept smaller pay.
Unions are bourgeoisie and capitalist adjacent and just roll over when worker rights get eroded. Striking was just outlawed last year I think and now they are working to get rid of Sunday pay and shift pay.
I could go on and on from housing to healthcare and back and it's the same story everywhere.
The only era this country has had anything resembling sovereignity was after the nazis here lost and were forced to conceed and were also watched over by the Soviet Union ever since. The bourgeoisie whining was non-stop, but the country did pretty well. Prior to WW2 the country was mostly owned by the British, including most industry. We are fast going back to that.
5
CocteauChameleons [none/use name] - 1w
The main issue with getting housing for poor or homeless here is this bad credit, not a single landlord will even consider someone who has a marking in their credit
Couldnt imagine living in a country like that /s
5
HexReplyBot [none/use name] - 1w
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
StillNoLeftLeft in chat
A pretty good primer about the state of things in Finland right now and added info
https://youtu.be/I67PvXAXJ8AFun fact, when he mentions how the poorest are mostly in debt, the debt is typically caused by healthcare bills, rents and other mandatory payments that people cannot afford to pay. Basic social security level in Finland is so low that a human rights organization has given a notice about it to Finland three times in a row. At the same time, healthcare fees are some of the highest in the world. Contrary to what is often known about our "free healthcare", it's not free, it's very expensive and the main reason for the debt of the poors.
The credit system in Finland is such that if someone has a mark on it, unpaid bills or debt, it prevents you from getting housing, loans and even basic services like home insurance, car insurance, a bank account, a phone service, electricity etc. completely. The mark used to last for years and would shut people pretty much fully out of society and it still does that, getting housing without clean credit is nearly impossible for example.
What is often then demanded from the very poorest is a sort of bond payment for the service that they are deemed unrealiable to get due to bad credit. Obviously nobody can pay a 400€ bond payment just to get electricity in their home if their entire monthly income is already only about 500€. Therefore these people are completely screwed no matter what.
Then if by miracle someone with bad credit like this gets a job, there is a system where most of their income gets deducted to pay the debt and this can't be avoided. So they often again can't pay for their basic needs, but also can't get credit due to bad credit.
Often these debts are things like 50-100€ healthcare bills that go to be collected into private debt firms that add huge sums of processing fees to them. The court also adds more fees to them. Once a small bill like this is unpaid, it trasfers into a debt worth hundreds. A poor family for example often is forced to skip paying these or daycare fees to feed their kids and all of these are the true debt of the poors. If you get caught travelling on the tram without a ticket, you get a 80€ fine for it and these mostly end up turning into debt as well, because the people using the tram without a ticket are often poor.
Point being that poor people don't have any consumer debt, because nobody can get those without a steady wage income. It's all this other mandatory stuff.
It's a vile system through and through. I've been in that situation myself for 20 years, due to an unpaid student loan and having been financially scammed as a young adult. I am now free from if, only thanks to help from loved ones, but will never be able to own anything because I don't have time to earn enough for that before I run out of worklife.
I work with people who are all in this situation. The main issue with getting housing for poor or homeless here is this bad credit, not a single landlord will even consider someone who has a marking in their credit and often the marking is from something like a bill from a dentist and just spirals out of control from there. As soon as these bills move to a credit firm they rise beyond anything a poor person could hope to pay. To levels beyond their income. It's a carceral system that keeps people in misery, by design.
Here's info on the state of social security in Finland: link
The Finnish government is stated to take this seriously, this was posted in 2023. Lol
They've taken it so seriously that most of these already very low benefits have been severely cut in the last two years and more cuts are planned. All in order to pay for the reduction in the corporate tax mentioned in the video for example.
Such Nordic social-democracy
Forgot to mention inflation and food prices and our extremely high VAT. Due to the high VAT a pretty large amount of taxes are already disproportionally paid for by the proletarians and the poorest in society.
Grocery stores and other basic manufacturing fields like mills and bakeries have been heavy monopolies in Finland for a very long time now and due to this there are only two or three chains of any one thing, mostly all owned by foreign capital or old capitalist families (previously feudal). This is how you get very high consumer pricing across the board.
Using the last 6 years as an excuse the capitalists have inflated the prices of everything to levels nobody can afford anymore. The benefits and wages meanwhile are going down or stagnating.
In 2020 you could do a trip to the store to feed a family of four for a week for about half of the funds it takes now, this is my own assesment.
It's getting very ripe in here, even the labor aristros are feeling the pain. During Marins pm years they were still given subsidies to keep quiet in the form of help in electricity bills. During the current government though, even my well paid relatives have stopped spending and moan about the cost of living daily.
Is this a new thing? I haven't heard this sort of thing about finland until very recently. How much has the finnish economy changed for workers in the past like 20 years? I saw your comment mentioning that it started to get worse after 2020, assumedly the bourgeois took advantage of the covid crisis, but was it already on such a downward trajectory?
It's not new. It got pretty bad right after the fall of the Soviet Union when we got introduced to shock therapy lite aka the depression which resulted in Finland losing it's currency and signing up for IMF austerity and privatization. The push by the bourgeoisie for this was never supressed, the finlandization propaganda, the rise of the far right from the 90s are all tied to this. So many lost their lifelihoods then and are in poverty to this day, many generationally. My family is one of these. It has just gotten progressively worse ever since.
We got the breadlines going in the 90s, today they go around blocks and for example families with children commonly need food aid, of which there isn't enough. It was the right wing governments at the time who from the 80s had started the push for "dismantling the bloated welfare state and universalism". Nato co-operation and joining the EU followed, both of which fucked us royally and still do. Public services have been meticulously eroded ever since. The payments were introduced into healthcare in 1992 and today they also include payments like payments for social services for the people who are in the most precarious positions. A homeless person has to pay for a housing service. Healtcare was fully free for a short while, but it didn't last long.
Public schooling and education has gone down the toilet. I was in school during this breaking down of the system and went from having books to erasing the same books for the next years students and not getting even a free pencil from school within years. Today the classes are huge, the admin is unbearable for the teacher, there are no longer special ed workers in classrooms, school cafeterias have lost their cooks, there are no services in school etc. All of this was previously provided. Students live on loans and this has been the case for decades.
Work is often precarious and apart from male dominated export fields most have a patchy work history. Lots of care work and service work that is outsourced to cheaper labor. The manufacturers have moved to cheap Eastern European countries and also Russia to exploit labor there and for example most of construction has been done by Estonians since the 90s as they accept smaller pay.
Unions are bourgeoisie and capitalist adjacent and just roll over when worker rights get eroded. Striking was just outlawed last year I think and now they are working to get rid of Sunday pay and shift pay.
I could go on and on from housing to healthcare and back and it's the same story everywhere.
The only era this country has had anything resembling sovereignity was after the nazis here lost and were forced to conceed and were also watched over by the Soviet Union ever since. The bourgeoisie whining was non-stop, but the country did pretty well. Prior to WW2 the country was mostly owned by the British, including most industry. We are fast going back to that.
Couldnt imagine living in a country like that /s
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: