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The UJF’s phone and email advice services for legal advice and information on collective agreements were busy throughout April, with 166 requests for assistance from members.
The helpline service received 70 calls, and there were 46 calls outside hotline hours. The lakimies(at)journalistiliitto.fi email support for legal advice received 41 messages. This figure does not include other email legal queries.
“The figures only cover initial contacts,” says advocacy head Petri Savolainen, who deals with advice on legal and collective agreement issues. “Some contacts are the start of a processes that can last for years.”
Savolainen says that based on the figures for April there are about a dozen contacts received a day by the phone and email service, which multiplied by the number of working days in a year amounts to over two thousand enquiries.
“This shows that legal and collective agreement advice is the union’s main and most used service for members. Above all this is a one-on-one contact, a service for members’ critical matters.”
Savolainen says there is no typical helpline issue on which members call. The subjects vary greatly. The calls received in April concerned matters such as pay, leave, dismissals, unemployment benefit, copyright, pensions, work community problems, taxation, work probation, fixed term contracts, family leave, source protection, and freelance fee collection and rate of pay.