The dominant political rhetoric in Finland states that Finnish politics aims at the deepening integration in Europe in terms of economic, social and environmental competitiveness. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja (2006), who is one of the vocal critics of this rhetoric, has argued that the emphasis in the recent debates is on economic integration.
In his view, the message is that the country has to forego its universal social services and employment safety, cut social security, public spending and taxes, privatise, outsource and open up for competition; in short go for the full monty of the neoliberal agenda in order to survive. Formulating a social-democratic critique of the current Finnish position, he further holds that social progress is a national issue, but it is also justi-fi ed in terms of the Nordic and the European goals, i.e. there is a consensus about social progress being included in develop-ment (Tuomioja 2008). In his view, the partnership in health and social wellbeing is also a precondition for the sustainable economic development of the Nordic region.
Since the early 1990’s the navigating of the Finnish ‘com-petition state’ (Sipilä 2005, Kettunen 2006) has been about the profi tability of the national economy. In economic and tech-nological terms, recent developments are refl ected in what has been termed a national ‘joint venture for productivity’
(VATT 2007). This drive for productivity encompasses welfare services and vocational educational schemes comprising al-most half of the Finnish welfare expenditure. More open com-petition is the key principle in the process of designing the
‘creative welfare society’. This authoritative view was formu-lated by the Parliamentary Committee for the Future chaired by the leading conservative politician, the present Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen (EK 2004). The statement of the com-mittee is that the pressures of welfare services and pension expenses endanger the speed of economic growth. A major solution propagated then in this scenario is the nexus model, a welfare mix in which the public sector has the dominating responsibility for fi nancing and control, while both private and public producers supply the services.
From a feminist perspective, the ongoing policy shift has, for instance, been critiqued with reference to democracy. It is argued that while democratic government should be about the social rights of the citizens, at present it is the gendered rights of those most capable in economic terms that are the key point of reference (Kailo 2007). At the same time, the
number of total working hours of full-time employed Finnish women is the highest in Europe. Furthermore, there is a lot of evidence that the outsourcing of public services often means an increase in women’s care responsibilities and workload, at the same time as their work-related social rights and pay have weakened (Eräsaari 2002, Julkunen 2004). Thus, from the point of the view of equality between women and men, Finland is far from perfect.
On the national policy level, the need for a ‘broad frame-work’ among ministries and sector administration is being ad-dressed (MHSA 2001a, b, 2002, 2007, see ILO 2007). Govern-mental welfare strategy emphasises mutual solidarity in terms of the ‘caring moral’ as a societal resource (MHSA 2007, 22).
Despite the welfare state ethos and its strong support, sectoral regulations demonstrate that the strongest social rights and shared responsibility concern the early phases of the life cycle whereas the more moderate ones are typical of the end of the cycle (Heikkilä 2005). None of the security systems ensure citizens the right to a certain service, but do safeguard their position in relation to the complicated service bureaucracy.
In the legal arena, the development towards stronger service rights is on target; new treatment guidelines concerning the provision of care within specifi c time frames are examples of the implementation of the principle of the social guarantee (Heikkilä 2007).
The logic guiding the making of new organisational mod-els and workforce designs is that of streamlining the ‘logistics’
of the ‘production lines’ (see Davies 2003). Seamless services, integrated care and fl uent fl ow-through are examples of the managerialist vocabulary being implemented in the name of cost-effectiveness and quality consciousness. Production lines from hospital to home, from special care to primary care and from vocational education to work are referred to as key processes of streamlining. This agenda is rooted in the view that the disturbances to this rational management of service production are created by economic, demograph-ic and institutional forces. For instance, rigid organisation
structures with their powerful professions and the out-of-date education schemes are referred to as obstacles to fl exibilisa-tion. The demographic pressures identifi ed by policymakers have also brought the issue of migrants as potential future care workers to the policy agenda. The national picture is, however, contradictory. On the one hand, there are calls for work-based immigration, on the other hand there is a long history of national discourse that makes it in practice diffi -cult to tolerate and deal with diversity (Lehtonen & Löytty 2007). Health care is especially known for being a national realm (Nieminen 2007).
Whatever the vocabulary used in the political or govern-mental arena, the care needs of the aging population are seen as a threat to the future capacity of the Finnish welfare state to produce public services. The eroding of the mandate of pub-lic care in general and elderly care in particular has created a crisis of care and especially an ongoing erosion of the ethos of socially defi ned care. As a service, child care is adopting the model of primary education while care for the elderly seems to be following health care procedures (Lehto et al. 1999, Wrede & Henriksson 2005). The social, particularly in the meaning of homemaking, is becoming excluded from public services (Tedre 1999). Within the occupational realms, the ex-pertise of social care is challenged. Academic social workers in Finland are constructing occupational boundaries and exclu-sive credentials (Julkunen 2004). For teachers and students at the polytechnic level, the value and the meanings of the so-cial as the cornerstones of vocational expertise are becoming blurred (Niiranen-Linkama 2005).