This week's episode of All Points North reported on a spike in calls to a labour rights helpline for immigrants during the pandemic.
"The Covid-19 pandemic increased the frequency of enquiries. So we received about a hundred more enquiries compared to the previous year. Many contacts were related to the coronavirus, people were really worried about their income and health as well as their rights as an employee," said Maaret Pulliainen, who runs the helpline for blue-collar trade union confederation SAK.
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Pulliainen's top piece of advice for workers during the pandemic is to not sign any document they don't fully understand, as it could entail a weakening of terms and conditions of employment.
We also spoke to UK Ambassador in Helsinki Tom Dodd, who is concerned about British citizens who might not have registered their presence yet and need to do so to safeguard their rights after Brexit.
"In order to guarantee their rights in perpetuity they need to register for a new EU residence scheme. That scheme is open, the application can be made on paper or electronically via the Migri website, there's a special Brexit website and it costs 49 euros. And they need to do this before the end of September this year," said Dodd.
In addition, we asked THL vaccine expert Hanna Nohynek why Finland is restricting use of AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine to the over-65s, talked a bit about the state budget talks going on this week, and explained why we're now restricting comments on our Facebook page.
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This week's show was presented by Egan Richardson and Zena Iovino. It wasproduced by Ronan Browne while the audio engineer was Laura Koso.
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