I've forgotten most of the details but the state organisation that deals with foreigners in Finland has had its name changed to reflect its supposedly new focus on customer friendliness.

The idea is that foreigners trying to get permission to live and work in Finland will in future be treated as "customers" rather than (hidden subtitle of the newspaper piece on that) as dirt.

We'll see how that idea plays out ...

That change happened at the New Year so it came too late for a couple of very qualified Russian researchers who according to the Swedish-speaking paper here (Hufvudstadsbladet) yesterday finally gave up after 14 years of barely being accepted here.

The tale is interesting because cases of Black Africans with doctorates who could only get jobs in the sorting office of the Post Office have been folk lore for years, but these are people working in a University environment who look like Finns.

The man and his wife moved to Finland in 1994 because the man - who was then working in Portland, Oregon - was offered a post at the University of Turku.

During the entire period of time until 2005 he was offered only a series of short-term contracts and his position was never made permanent. In 2005 he was told there no longer was a short-term contract and since then "he has worked without pay". What happened in 2005 was that he had requested to be paid the same rate as his fellow Finnish researchers, many of which had lesser qualifications (and, according to one comment in the article, didn't work as hard). The inference of course was that it was this requested to be treated as equal that had led to a sudden lack of a follow-up contract.

Meanwhile his wife wasn't allowed to work at all for the first couple of years before finally being granted the kind of visa that allowed this and then she too became a researcher. In the early 2000's she applied to be a Finnish citizen and had her otherwise valid application rejected because the state organisation (probably the same one that is now going to be customer friendly ....) had not accepted the qualifications of the person (at the University) who had certified that the woman spoke a "state of Finland" language (probably Swedish in her case rather than Finnish hence the above construction - either are however acceptable in Finnish law). Her appeal against this had now been (after 2 years) accepted but that only meant that she would have had to apply again.

(In the meantime the daughter (26) now working as a researcher in Brussels, but as far as I can gather with her base still in Turku - and with a degree from the Swedish-speaking Unversity there ("Åbo Akademi") had been granted Finnish citizenship earlier with no problem.)

Now that girls parents were moving back to the States, fully aware that, if they had stayed there in 1994, by now the man would long have had tenure at some US University.

It's hard for me to relate directly to this. Certainly in my previous company I was mostly treated well and as far as I know had a salary that didn't differ that much from other people with my experience. However salary isn't everything and what I have noticed is that I haven't been used for things that it would have been more logical to use me for rather than a Finn.

In that previous company, I had been the only IT person who had been involved with the entire course of a proposed purchase of a ready-made software application from a US company and had been used throughout (in addition to having a normal IT role) as a link between the Americans and the Finns. Then came the time to visit the US company and ten people were sent from my company for a week to S. Carolina - five from IT and five users. Needless to say (considering the subject here) I wasn't one of them. A couple of the IT people (and some of the users) had never even talked / listened to the Americans when they had (often) come to Finland; nevertheless they were sent to the US.

Similarly when my present company was taken over by a British-based more international company, I expected that I would be used in some kind of role for the transition projects. I wasn't. All the members of the transition projects were Finns and some of them (as I heard when I was located near a tele-conferencing room) had poor English. Nevertheless no thought was given to using someone like me as a bridge.

I'm not sure what we can blame for this. These days it is popular to say that Finland needs qualified immigrants yet at the same time there is either a reluctance to employ non-Finns in jobs which match those qualifications or a reluctance to accept any different approaches to working than standard Finnish approaches. I remember when many years ago I went for a job in Germany and the boss there said that he liked the combination of British and German IT people - roughly because the British wanted to do everything quickly with little or no planning and the Germans wanted to plan, and plan, and plan; thus the combination produced good work in a reasonable time. This wouldn't in my opinion happen here. any attempt I've made to work in non-Finnish ways and perhaps more effective ways has either been ignored or has been shot down in flames.

(In Finland it seems the concept of testing boundaries isn't known. Instead of a gentle rebuke when you in effect poke your foot just over the line (so you stop!), nothing happens. So you move the whole leg across ... and nothing happens. And so it goes on until your entire body is across the line and Bang! you are threatened with dismissal. True story.)

(Another thing that has happened to me twice (at least, I noticed it particularly twice) is that (again in my previous job) steps were taken while I was on holiday to reverse things that affected me. In one case I had spent a lot of time creating and constantly refining an Excel model that proved beyond all shadow of a doubt that buying a third-generation SAN system from H-P was better (for all reasonable variations of parameters ) over a three to five year period than buying a second-generation IBM SAN system where initial costs were lower but where maintenance started earlier and a second system would be needed earlier (etc.). When I came back after holiday my boss had replaced my model with a different extremely simple spreadsheet which ignored all parameters and just simply listed the rival quotes for Year 1. That same boss had a year earlier agreed with me before my holiday a division of work with a Finn only to announce publically on the day I was back (with me hearing this then for the first time) that two/thirds of what had been agreed was my responsibility were to be dealt with by the other person. I don't know if this is part of the same Finnish trait (as in the testing boundaries story) of not wanting to face up to unpleasantness or not.

Whatever, I look forward with interest to seeing whether renaming a state organisation will have any real effect on the "customer-friendliness" of the Finns staffing it. Somehow I doubt it.