Our compensation amount rose to nearly 700 million euros last year
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- Income security
- Unemployment
- YTK
In 2023, we gained tens of thousands of new members and paid out almost 700 € million in daily allowances. The rise in unemployment was reflected in daily allowance costs.
The YTK Unemployment Fund’s position as the largest unemployment fund in Finland was further consolidated in 2023, with 56,940 new members joining last year.
At the end of the year, the YTK Unemployment Fund had 528 554 members.
A total of 616 431 applications were received by the YTK. Of these, 58 845 were initial applications, i.e. applications for unemployment or lay off, and 509 963 were follow-up applications.
On the basis of these applications, a total of 695.9 € million in daily allowances was paid. This is 8% more than in 2022. Unemployment increased, which was reflected in the daily allowance expenditure.
“The rise in unemployment is directly reflected in the daily allowance expenditure. We have many members from the construction sector, for example, which had a bad business cycle last year,” says Auli Hänninen, CEO of the YTK Unemployment Fund.
Adjusted daily allowance accounted for 79.6 € million and full daily allowance for 615.9 € million. Most of the daily allowance was therefore paid to the totally unemployed or those who were completely laid off.
Hundreds of thousands of messages with members
Our customer service representatives were in contact with our members hundreds of thousands of times. Our phones rang 126,378 times last year, and we answered the vast majority of these – 99,126 calls to be precise. We received a whopping 223 546 messages and sent even more to our customers – 281 148 messages.
Our chatbot was also very busy. It handled a total of 42,968 conversations, of which 6,531 were followed up on the customer service chat side.
Successful campaign for law change
The YTK Unemployment Fund has long wanted to expand the role of unemployment funds in the direction of broader job security. To support this aim, the YTK ran a major communication campaign in spring 2023 to promote a change in the law allowing unemployment funds to provide employment support services.
The campaign was successful and hopefully the law will be changed already this year.
“The right to provide employment support services is a long-term goal of ours, as we want to secure the careers of our members more broadly. It is therefore really great that changes to the law are being prepared so that we can develop a new service model,” says Auli Hänninen.