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Minister sees good employment prospects for municipal employees JHL (23.01.2012 - Juhani Artto) There are plenty of job opportunities, now and especially in the future, in the municipal sector. This is the core message of Henna Virkkunen, the Minister of Public Administration and Local Government, in her interview with Motiivi, the magazine of the Trade Union for the Public and Welfare Sectors JHL. A third of the current municipal personnel will retire by 2020 and with the population ageing rapidly this clearly makes for more demand in terms of health and social services, she argues. With this assurance Virkkunen wants to allay any fears municipal employees may have towards the profound restructuring of the network of municipalities now underway by the government of Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen. This project is the single most important structural reform of the present government, which has been in power since June 2011. The government aims to reduce the number of municipalities from 336 to about hundred or even less, by spring 2015 when the next Parliamentary elections take place. These assurances are needed although the government programme states that municipality reform will not lead to redundancies among employees. Virkkunen suggests that in the near future a labour shortage may be a more likely problem than having too many employees in municipal organizations. And it should be remembered that the previous government also worked for municipal amalgamation, which resulted in scores of municipalities being merged. During this change municipal employees were offered a five year guarantee for the continuation of their employment relations. Their tasks, however, did not always remain unchanged. This politically and technically demanding municipal reform is motivated by the urgency to safeguard municipalities' ability to offer the services they are mandated to perform. Another motive is to equalize the levels of municipal taxes. Right now the gap between the highest and lowest municipal tax rates is about 5 percentage points and experts warn that the gap will grow -in 10 or 15 years- to 15 percentage points unless something is done to prevent this from happening. Another positive message for municipal employees was the warning as to the risks involved when outsourcing municipal services. Outsourcing is not a good alternative in sectors where there is no competition, she says. "There is the danger that the municipal organization of the sector will be shut down and the municipality will become dependent on a single service provider."
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