Since the beginning of last year, 2000 Finns are getting money from the government each month – and they are not expected to do anything in return. The participants, aged 25–58, are all unemployed, and were selected at random by Kela, Finland’s social-security institution. Instead of unemployment benefits, the participants now receive €560, or $690, per month, tax free. Should they find a job during the two-year trial, they still get to keep the money.
While the project is praised internationally for being at the cutting edge of social welfare, back in Finland, decision makers are quietly pulling the brakes, making a U-turn that is taking the project in a whole new direction.
”Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income,” Kela researcher Miska Simanainen told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.
The initial plan was for the experiment to be expanded in early 2018 to include workers as well as non-workers early in 2018, but that did not happen – to the disappointment of researchers at Kela. Without workers in the project, researchers are unable to study whether basic income would allow people to make new career moves, or enter training or education.
”Two years is too short a timeframe to be able to draw extensive conclusions from such a vast experiment. We ought to have been given additional time and more money to achieve reliable results,” professor Olli Kangas, one of the experts behind the basic-income trial, told Finland’s public-service broadcaster YLE.
Contrary to universal basic income, however, which advocates say should apply to all citizens regardless of background, Finland's trial is only targeting people in long-term unemployment.
The existing unemployment benefits were so high, the Finnish government argued, and the system so rigid, an unemployed person might choose not to take a job as they would risk losing money by doing so – the higher your earnings, the lower your social benefits. The basic income was meant as an incentive for people to start working.
But in December last year, the Finnish parliament passed a bill that is taking the country’s welfare system in quite the opposite direction. The new ’activation model’ law requires jobseekers to work a minimum of 18 hours for three months – if you don’t manage to find such a job, you lose some of your benefits. And Finance Minister Petteri Orpo already has plans for a new project once the basic income pilot concludes in December 2018.
”When the basic income experiment ends this year, we should launch a universal credit trial,” Orpo told Finnish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, referring to a system similar to that currently in use in the United Kingdom, which collects a number of different benefits and tax credits into one account.
No official results of Finland’s basic income experiment will be published until 2019, after the pilot has come to an end.