Finland’s right-wing government has proposed several laws reducing social benefits and restricting union activities. One proposed law would limit salaries to the rate paid in the export sector (part of the global capitalist effort to drive down wages to the lowest level at which it is possible to sustain life, enforced through global trade deals), and to restrict the right to general strikes and other strikes addressing issues that go beyond pay and working conditions so that they could not last more than a day. Some of these right-wing “reforms” have already been adopted.

Since December, the unions have organized many short strikes against the “reforms,” the most powerful of which is the dockers strike, which in March and April suspended most exports and imports for a month. But the government did not retreat, and the unions did not dare to organize a general strike.

In response, anarchists in Helsinki at the May 1 Left March together with the Kurds organized a block demanding a general strike, which about 400 people joined. A photo can be found here: