Construction union recovers one million euros in unpaid wages

Construction companies left about one million euros in wages and related payments unpaid over the past year, Finland’s construction workers’ union Rakennusliitto told Yle. The union said underpayment and other forms of labour exploitation are particularly common among foreign workers.

Cases include workers not receiving the wages required under collective agreements, or having excessive deductions made from their pay for housing costs. Employers have also made arbitrary or poorly justified deductions, including for allegedly poor workmanship.

The union has also encountered cases in which workers were asked to pay a threshold fee to obtain a job. Yle’s investigative programme MOT has reported on one such case, although Rakennusliitto said illegal demands for these payments are rare.

“Most of the problems involve foreign workers,” said Toni Malmström, a senior specialist in Rakennusliitto’s international labour unit. “They may not know their rights, or they may be in a situation where the shortage of jobs forces them to accept poor working conditions. They may also fear losing their residence permit if they become unemployed.”

The unit has three employees and generally focuses on the most serious cases. Malmström said the cases they see represent only “the tip of the iceberg”. The union deals with at least hundreds of underpayment cases each year, he said.

Rakennusliitto cannot directly collect unpaid wages. Instead, it helps workers negotiate with employers or take cases to court.

“Legally, these are often private-law matters in which workers must ultimately demand payment through the courts,” said Jussi Sakari, another senior specialist at the union. “An authority can require payments to be handled correctly in the future, but it cannot order companies to pay anything retroactively.”

“This is a hellish problem that cannot be solved with any single quick fix,” Sakari said.

The union said responsibility becomes less clear when work is divided among long chains of contractors, particularly on large construction sites. Yle’s MOT reported in May 2026 on workers’ rights being violated at a Helsinki city construction project in Pasila, where a block of flats was being renovated by the main contractor and about 100 other companies.

One way to reduce underpayment would be to make the main contractor ultimately financially responsible for the project, Sakari said.

The construction sector also has many so-called light entrepreneurs, a status that gives workers fewer rights than employment. Yle’s investigations suggest that some people work in this status against their will.

The sector has become increasingly international, a development accelerated by large data centre projects. In many projects, the main contractor is foreign and some of the workers also come from abroad.

Foreign workers previously came mainly from Estonia, other Baltic countries and eastern Central European countries such as Poland and Romania. Rakennusliitto said workers from Bangladesh, the Philippines and China are now increasingly found on construction sites.

At a Rakennusliitto event on labour exploitation, a representative of Victim Support Finland said contacts concerning work-related exploitation had increased sharply during the 2020s. Such exploitation is particularly common in the restaurant, construction and cleaning sectors, and refers to using a vulnerable worker for financial gain in breach of laws or employment conditions.