The sentencing by a court on Friday of a Perussuomalaiset (PS)* city councilman and member of the Mikkeli city board to three months in prison speaks volumes about the party’s anti-immigration rhetoric, according to Länsi-Savo.
Matti Siitari, who was general manager of M-S Metalli between 2006 and 2010, forced 17 Estonian employees to work 13-hour days seven days a week without rest never mind holidays and pay.
Contrarily, Finnish employees at the company worked eight-hour days five days a week and were paid overtime and holiday pay.
M-S Metalli filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and owes the Estonian workers 500,000 euros in back payments, according to Länsi-Savo.
Siitari is a typical PS politician when it comes to his views on immigration and immigrants. The PS municipal politician is all for tighter immigration policy. Even so, Finland’s already tight migration policy didn’t help the 17 Estonian employees working for him.
Siitari has not yet announced his resignation as councilman or member of the city board.
Read full story (in Finnish) here.
On his Facebook page, the PS politician ‘likes’ MP Olli Immonen and Espoo city councilman Teemu Lahtinen.
Immonen’s anti-immigration and especially Islamophobic stances are well known. He is chairman of Suomen Sisu, a far-right association that is against white Finns marrying foreigners.
Lahtinen, who was caught “liking” neo-Nazi Facebook page Kansallinen Vastarinta, was a member in the 1990s of Isänmaalinen Kansanliike (IKL), a fascist political group that idolized Benito Mussolini when it first existed between 1932 and 1944.
In the 1990s, the IKL used to have close ties with far-right parties such as the National Front of France, Belgian Vlaams Belang and Sweden Democrats.
Siitari’s prison sentence sheds a dubious light on this week’s statement by PS’ Matti Putkonen, who raised the party’s estimate of the cost of immigration from 1-1.5 billion euros on Friday to close to 2 billion euros.
Putkonen’s claim is outright ridiculous since the majority of migrants living in Finland work, pay taxes and consume.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.