Articles containing the keyword 'forest labour'

The data on housing conditions presented in this study derives from the general population census of Finland of 1950. The sub-sample of professional forest workers was taken from the sample collected for the larger investigation of rural labour force. The housing density of professional forest workers was considerably higher than the average for the population in general. The total population of the country, according to the 1950 Census, showed a ratio of 154 persons to 100 rooms, while the average weighted with the number of rooms for forest workers was 237:100, and the unweighted 340:100. If three per room is taken as the limit of crowded housing, nearly half of the professional forest workers lived in crowded conditions. Over two-thirds of them owned their dwellings, and only 2% of them lived in dwellings owned by the employer. Three quarters of all the men belonged to the holder-family of small farms. About three quarters of them lived in dwellings of one or two rooms. Also, the size of the family and household affected the housing density. The housing density exceeds the average in the youngest age classes. This is probably because the sons of families with poor economic standing must start work young in forestry, and those families have a high housing density. A quarter of the families had electricity in their dwellings. Few had running water or sewage in their houses.

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• Väänänen, E-mail: sv@mm.unknown

In Finland the general shortage of labour during the Second World War called attention to employment problems in forestry. After the war the scope widened to include sociological and human maters. The Finnish Rural Labour Force Study deals with the whole rural labour force, not only forest work. Due to the scale of the subject, pilot studies were started by the Institute of Forest Economics at the University of Helsinki and the Central Statistical Office and the Board of Agriculture in 1950. This article describes in detail the methods used in the pilot studies the and main survey.

The aim of the survey was to obtain a reliable picture of three subjects. 1) The labour input of the male rural population during the observation year, its distribution and the seasonal fluctuations in the structure of labour input. 2) The unemployment time of the rural population, the periods underemployment and its seasonal variation. 3) The number of male workers engaged for a shorter or longer period during the year in certain occupation. The paper discusses the different data sources and ways to collect the data either from enterprises or workers. One of the obstacles is the large number of enterprises in agriculture and forestry. Consequently, the total number of people employed in a particular industry, its distribution and the duration of the working season can be estimated only from a sample selected from the population.

The data of the survey is based on a systematic sample, collected by interviews, of the annual round of activity in 1950 of 44,667 men of 15-64 years of age living in Finnish rural communes. The interviews were made in connection with the 1950 census of Finland. The results of the survey are presented in the other articles of Acta Forestalia Fennica issue 63.

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• Heikinheimo, E-mail: lh@mm.unknown