Legislative changes, including changes to the laws on earnings-related pensions, are needed to better support an effective return to working life, a report from the Finnish Pensions Alliance (Tela) has suggested.

Tela emphasised that the costs of disability are significant for the Finnish economy, with estimates ranging from €3bn to €5bn annually, depending on the calculation method.

And more work is needed to address this, as Tela specialist expert, Turkka Sinisalo, warned that, as the population ages, a welfare society can only be developed if as many people as possible are able to cope and continue working.

“Now is the time to change sickness and disability benefits and services so that they support an effective return to work and keep more and more people involved in building society according to their working capacity,” Sinisalo said.

Tela, alongside experts from earnings-related pension insurers, has therefore outlined around 30 proposals intended to deliver a smoother return to working life, by activating more sickness benefit and disability benefit periods.

In particular, it argued that services to restore work capacity should be provided during sickness benefits, pointing out that sickness-based benefits, such as fixed-term disability pensions, currently have fairly long benefit periods without obligations or even opportunities to participate in services.

“At their worst, the benefit and service system together marginalize people into deeper illness and disability,” Sinisalo warned.

“A person can have a desire to work, even if their ability to work is only partially retained, temporarily or permanently. There seems to be no place for the potential of these people in our society.”

Given this, the paper argued that various services that support and restore work ability should be more closely linked to the sickness benefit period and the existing sickness benefit checkpoints.

As part of this, it suggested that earnings-based pension insurers and employment services should intensify their cooperation and exchange of information so that service paths run more smoothly.

“When the employment pension rehabilitation ends, it should be possible to forward the unemployed job seeker's rehabilitation plan to employment services so that they can take it into account when examining the person's employment conditions,” Sinisalo said.

“To support the return to work, Kela should be obliged to inform employees and employers about the possibility of partial sickness allowance for 60 days of sickness allowance,” Sinisalo suggested.

“The occupational health service work trial should be utilised much more widely than it is now. The law should be updated so that in the occupational health service work trial, one could try out one's own work without requiring a substantial change in work tasks or special arrangements.

“At best, the occupational health service work trial could become a genuinely effective form of early-stage vocational rehabilitation that prevents the prolongation of disability and supports the return to working life.”

This was not the only call for change, as the report also argued that guidance and methods for rehabilitation for earnings-related pensions must be improved.

In particular, the report argued that the law stipulating several criteria for rehabilitation for earnings-related pensions, one of which concerns the threat of disability, should be clarified

“Earnings-related pension rehabilitation should also be more possible than before for younger age groups with more common work capacity problems, namely, above all, mental health illnesses,” Sinisalo explained.

“According to the current definition, the threat must be directed at a general threat of incapacity for work, i.e. the inability to do any work. We believe it would be appropriate to refine the definition of threat so that rehabilitation would require a probable threat of occupational incapacity for work.

“In this case, the incapacity for work would be reflected specifically in the applicant's own profession.”

In addition to changing the criteria for granting earnings-related pension rehabilitation, Tela called for more to be done to develop the means of rehabilitation, arguing that effective rehabilitation requires that the employer be given greater responsibility for rehabilitation than before.

“In practice, employers should be able to arrange more apprenticeships, work trials, part-time work and modified work to suit the needs of the person undergoing rehabilitation,” Sinisalo stated.

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