Working Life Barometer in the Baltic Countries 2002 (pdf) - mol.fi

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favourable direction and the development has, on the whole, been very evenly
distributed.
Estonia is the only Baltic country where the membership drain from the trade
unions has halted and the trend has taken a slight turn for the better. Nevertheless,
the proportion of working people who belong to trade unions is still
only fairly small (14 %). In Estonia, as in the other Baltic nations, the trade
union members are mainly public-sector workers. The new members, too, are
public sector workers; the degree of unionisation in the private sector is at exactly
the same level as in the previous study just over three years ago (8 %).
Moreover, the membership is weighted not only according to sector, but also
according to age and nationality. Ageing workers more frequently belong to
trade unions than young ones do. Similarly, it is more common for Russians to
be union members than it is for Estonian nationals. Gender, on the other hand,
has no significant bearing on union membership. A considerable problem for
trade unions in Estonia is that only quite a small percentage of Estonia's
working personnel (14 %) know what the unions do nowadays.
One development that can be reckoned as positive is the narrowing of the salary
gap between the genders. On average, however, it is clear that the women
still earn much less than the men; and so, even though the trend has been positive,
the situation can by no means be regarded as particularly good. Taken as
a whole, the difference in salary between the genders is at present about 30 %.
At new workplaces, the salary differences between men and women are at
their greatest - although there, too, some evening out has taken place. In the
earlier survey (in the latter part of 1998), the women's salaries at the new
workplaces averaged only 56 % of the men's; in this study, the corresponding
figure was 63 %. Thus, despite the positive trend, the gender gap in salaries is
still great. The smallest differences between them are at the old state workplaces.
The overall development in earnings, however, is problematic, since
only about one-tenth of the working people believed that their real purchasing
power would improve during the following year. The men were clearly more
optimistic than the women in this respect. Estonia's workers took a pessimistic
view not only of their own economic development, but also of the employment
development in the country as a whole.