The Significance of Work

It was not only financial considerations that influenced choices. In the following section, I explore how education and work, and the link between them, were understood. What kind of an education was valued? What was regarded as important concerning working life? Some young people were rather bored with school after the eight years, and they were more than happy that the final year of compulsory schooling was drawing to an end.

Educationalist Juha Kauppila (2002, 14) has researched the changing role of education in the twentieth century. He divides Finns born during the twentieth century into three groups. The first generation was born before the mid-1930s, and they received a meagre education. This led them to regard education as an ideal. The second cohort, born in the mid-1930s to mid-1950s, were a generation of increasing—but unequal—education. For them, education was instrumental. The third cohort, born after the mid-1950s, was a generation of welfare and educational choices. For them, education had become self-evident. The significance of free time had increased at the expense of working life.

According to Kauppila’s categorisation, the young people researched here belong to the second generation, for whom education was instrumental. Their parents represent the first generation. Education’s instrumental role is clearly found in the vocational guidance documents, but it seems that the elementary school pupils’ parents also adopted a very practical, non-idealised stance towards education.

Working-class families have been noted to emphasise practical skills: theoretical knowledge was valuable only in clear connection to practical implications. This view contrasted with the middle-class families’ views, which valued knowledge because it—and, more importantly, qualifications—was a means of securing the class position and the aim for upward social mobility. Educationalists and psychologists were already paying attention to the straightforward attitude of elementary school pupils and their families to school and working life in the 1960s (Jauhiainen 2002, 236–237; Ball 2003). It closely resembles the attitude of the working-class ‘lads’ in Paul Willis’ (1979, 57–58) classical study, Learning to Labour, which focused on an industrial town in 1970s England.

The most important reason for the elementary school pupils to acquire more education was to aim for a more stable and secure position in working life. There were still plenty of jobs that did not require any vocational training. The disadvantage of these manual jobs was that one could not expect any increase in wages, and unemployment afflicted the unskilled workers more than others. Formal education was still rather uncommon in the employed population overall in 1960: only a third of men and a little more than a fifth of women had received a formal education in Helsinki (HT 1963d). Some parents, however, foresaw that this would drastically change. For example, one schoolboy’s father attempted to convince his son to apply to vocational school because ‘with only elementary school, you can’t really get a good job’. The father appreciated schooling greatly, and according to the guidance counsellor, he wanted his children have the ‘will to get ahead’. The boy’s older brother and sister had studied at vocational schools, and his younger sister attended lower secondary school (elementary schoolboy, number 91).

The emphasis on vocational schooling was linked to a high respect for work. Working was a self-evident fact that provided the basic structure of life for the parents’ generation, and hard-working people were valued highly. Historian Pauli Kettunen has noted that in Finland, work has been considered a duty, whereas in Sweden, for example, work has been perceived as an individual’s right. Working was associated with decency and respectability, and it was considered to bind citizens to society (Suikkanen et al. 2001, 17–18; Väänänen and Turtiainen 2014, 264; Kettunen 1995, 272–275). For instance, one boy’s father expressed his wish that the youth employment office would arrange a job for his son as soon as compulsory school ended. He was afraid that otherwise his son would end up ‘wandering the streets without a job like so many others’. That would only teach him laziness, which was considered very dangerous. Luckily, the boy’s brother-in-law arranged a job for him as a trainee car mechanic (elementary schoolboy, number 23).

Diligence was essential for girls as well. One father wrote: ‘We would like to get our daughter to start working, the sooner the better, so that she would understand that everybody has to have a job and earn one’s living.’ At the end of the term, however, the daughter did not look for a job. Her brother’s family needed a nanny so that the brother could study and his wife work (elementary schoolgirl, number 16).14 Some of the young girls had already plenty of experience of childcare and household work, and in some families, they were expected to stay at home to take care of younger sisters and brothers, cousins, or older siblings’ children (elementary schoolgirls, numbers 9, 20 and 24). On the other hand, this did not necessarily differ from the work of their employed peers. Half of all Finnish fifteen- to nineteen-year-old girls working outside agriculture and forestry were employed as either domestic help or shop assistants.

Some parents stressed that their child’s future job or occupation should be ‘proper’ (elementary schoolboys, numbers 27, 34 and 64; elementary schoolgirl, number 8). This implied that the job or occupation should involve some vocational skills, fair pay, and reasonable employment prospects leading to security and continuity. In fear of unemployment, all risks were avoided. This observation can be studied using the concept of relative risk. For instance, acquiring a lengthy education can be perceived as a risk. It demanded contributions (time, energy, money) but offered the chance of a positive outcome, even though better and more stable employment was not guaranteed. The families weighed up the probabilities of success with the costs. The importance of reasoned investment was all the more crucial if the family had no strong financial safety net. The perception of risk was constructed socially through the previous experiences and norms of the social class (Silvennoinen 2002, 59–60; Furlong and Cartmel 2007, 9).

On the other hand, the prospect of having a stable and fairly paid job—even without any considerable opportunities for advancement—might have been an improvement compared to the experiences of the previous generation. The strong and long-lasting recession of the early 1930s and World War II had caused serious uncertainty and insecurity. The 1950s had largely been a time of economic growth. Although the unemployment rate was very low in Helsinki, seasonal and regional unemployment continued to cause anxiety. Unemployment or the inability to work could cause a serious crisis for an individual and his/her family.15 One girl, already referenced above, lived with her parents and brother in a small studio without a separate kitchen.

The concerns over unemployment involved the baby boomers in particular because it was feared that the labour market could not absorb the exceptionally large cohort. Two governmental committees discussed the matter, and they recommended research on the labour market, the intensification of the labour exchange and vocational guidance, and the augmentation of vocational education. This signalled a slow change in the labour policy. Augmenting education and no longer organising relief work began to be seen as the decisive solution (KM 1956, 11, 1957, 12, 10–11; Silvennoinen 2002, 95, 191; Kalela 1989, 197). Although these actions were implemented only partly and gradually in Finland, they facilitated the situation, and the fear of large-scale unemployment never materialised. Continuous economic growth and extensive emigration in the late 1960s to Sweden, which was suffering from a labour shortage, aided the circumstances. On the other hand, despite the general idea of youth transitions being unproblematic and linear in the 1960s, individual experiences of transitions from school to work could be very complex and multiphased (Goodwin and O’Connor 2005). This is, however, something that my source material and the scope of this chapter does not cover.