The Swedish-Speaking Population on the Finnish Labor Market

Authors

• Fjalar Finnäs

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23979/fypr.44986

Keywords:

language groups, socioeconomic position, labor force participation, unemployment

Abstract

The Swedish-speaking population in Finland constitutes a linguistic minority in numbers,
but has equal constitutional rights with the Finnish-speaking majority. In the
J 9th century, Swedish was the dominant language af government, business and culture.
At present, though, the two language groups have almost the same distributions
by industry and socioeconomic position at the national level. Generally, the differences
between regions are wider than between the two language groups. The labor
force participation rate is also very much the same. The unemployment rate, however,
is clearly lower among Swedish speakers and retirement at an early age (i.e. disability
pension) less common. These disparities remain also after a great number ofbackground
variables have been controlled for.