Author: Caterina Fake

I’ve been working a long time to help protect women and children who have been forced into prostitution through their addictions, poverty, history of sexual abuse and vulnerability, and find that the language used to describe these typically abused and disempowered women is really problematic. I agree with this from Ruchira Gupta, the activist and documentary filmmaker widely recognized for her work as an advocate for prostituted women and children:

Gupta also realises how, over the years, sensitive subjects get glossed over with problematic vocabulary. “We do not use the term ‘sex worker’ anymore because we believe it’s so inherently exploitative that we do not want to define it as work under any circumstances. So, we use the term ‘prostituted child’, because there is no such thing as a child prostitute—someone did it to the child. And we use the term ‘prostituted woman’. We realise the patriarchy of the system that is exploiting the vulnerabilities of these girls and women.”

Vogue India

(As an aside, I was just talking with a friend about how we used to read Vogue “for the articles”; you don’t expect topics like this from Vogue, and yet I read so many like it. This is from Vogue India, and India is of course known as one of the worst places to be a woman–and is often ranked the worst–in multiple studies. It was often first, with Afghanistan coming in second, but they may now have switched spots.)

Do more people speak Telugu than Italian? Yes. Really interesting graphic showing that the world is even more Asian than you thought.

Vappu, the Finnish holiday celebrated on May 1, turns out to be the shortening of the name of Valpurga, and is a celebration of Saint Walpurga, a German saint, known for her enthusiasm for witch-burning. Christian holiday-making from that era specialized in the transformation of nature-based and animistic pagan celebrations into Christian holidays of extreme misogyny. The first of May is also Beltane, the Celtic and Gaelic pagan celebration of the beginning of summer, marked by driving cattle to their summer pastures (or here in urban Helsinki, by changing your car from winter to summer tires.)

It’s also when Finnish students wear their graduation hats and you will find balloons, confetti and picnics. It wouldn’t be a holiday without a special pastry either, in this case Tippaleipä — bread that looks like brains. There’s something sweet for every event, large or small, like the pastry that celebrates ice skating season.

As with so many pagan holidays, there is fire, as Wikipediat notes: “Special bonfires were kindled, and their flames, smoke and ashes were deemed to have protective powers. The people and their cattle would walk around or between bonfires, and sometimes leap over the flames or embers. All household fires would be doused and then re-lit from the Beltane bonfire.”

It’s also International Workers Day. Maypole dancing also occurs apparently, though I’ve never witnessed this. The first Mayday celebrations were Roman, and were associated with Flora, the flower goddess. Flowers are meant to appear, but it was snowing here this morning…

I hadn’t visited Indeed.com for years, but I had a job I wanted to post somewhere, so was seeking job posting sites, and at the same time learned that someone I knew was about to take a job in Portugal at a company called Teleperformance. She sent me a link to a YouTube video about the company, posted by the company itself.

Something about the video seemed suspicious in that “too good to be true” way, so I searched for reviews, and found a page on Indeed.com about Teleperformance. The reviews were indeed horrifying! They are in many languages, and I can only read French and English, but those were enough. It sounded like a nightmare of a job, attracting young people under false pretenses, paying them almost nothing, putting them up in terrible, moldy apartments, making women feel unsafe, making them stay for 9 months in order to get their flight refund…it went on and on.

But there were two other things I noticed. Indeed.com had pinned a positive review to the top of the page. Maybe they are paid to surface positive reviews? Unclear. And it explained a bit too much about the business, as if it were coming from the company itself. However, the other thing I noticed was that all of the positive reviews were completely without specifics.

You can hire bands of freelance reviewers on places like Fiverr to post positive reviews to Yelp, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc. Often these can be easily identified by their lack of specificity. If you removed all the non-specific positive reviews, Teleperformance would be left with just bad-to-terrible reviews.

Defrauding customers on review sites is also illegal. So I have reported the fraud here, but I am guessing that this particular company is not the only one stacking the deck. And they’re doing it with an assist from Indeed.com itself.

Here is where you can report fraud to the FTC. There is an ocean of this stuff, and obviously this report will get drowne in a sea of similar such reports. How can we get integrity back into the internet? Why can’t review sites maintain their integrity? Should we wipe the internet and start again? Sometimes I think we should.

After talking to friends hoping to move from Silicon Valley to Europe, and going through a frustrating year of working with Migri, I wrote to Director of Migri Jari Kähkönen in September and included a list of recommendations for attracting talent to Finland.

Here are the recommendations (and rationale):

A growing number of my colleagues now work remotely from Iceland, Portugal, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Bali, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Singapore, Estonia, Germany and other places. Many expect to return to the SF Bay Area after the pandemic, but some will likely stay in their new home countries.

This is an opportunity for Finland. I hope to move my family here because of Finland’s reputation as a country with a stable social democratic government, benefitting from a high level of social cohesion and trust, which is enormously appealing in uncertain times. The education system has a strong reputation overseas, and the quality of life in terms of healthcare, education, technological sophistication, progressive politics and work/life balance are tremendously attractive to foreigners. The fact that most urban Finns speak English, and that it is the official language in many companies, is also important. Finland is seen overseas as technologically advanced, enlightened, stable and supportive. If you wish us welcome, others will follow.

1. Fast track. Create a fast track for highly qualified talent and a separate unit that manages it end-to-end. Remote identification, 48h processing time. These people will make outsize contributions to the Finnish economy. Do not rely on your existing Migri processes if you wish to welcome and retain them.

2. Remote worker residency. A type D visa for U.S. tech employees working from Finland, inclusive of their families. Requiring Silicon Valley companies to create Finnish subsidiaries for temporary remote workers is a nonstarter. Even multinationals like Facebook and Google prefer to retain their remote workforce in their U.S. cost centers.

3. Investor visa. For investors applying for residency to Finland, inclusive of families. Due to their work many investors wish to keep both U.S. and European residencies and they should be able to spend part of the year in Finland. 13 other European countries offer investor visas. New Zealand has found their investment in New Zealand multiplies in a few years.

4. One step process. Permanent home address registration, national ID card, strong identification, and Suomi.fi and Omakanta credentials should be automatically issued with the residency permit. The current Kafkaesque morass of in-person appointments, paper documents and confusing online flows should be replaced with a modern automated system.

5. English language schools. Finland fails to capitalize on its reputation for excellent education by not investing in a meaningful way in an English language school path. Despite claims about increased capacity, only one of Helsinki’s schools offers an English language track and the European School & handful of private schools in the Helsinki area are full with waitlists. New English language school tracks should urgently be established.

6. Targeted talent attraction. I know from experience from my investments that talented individuals move in groups. Hire a team of American-Finnish marketers located in the U.S. to compete with the other countries. The window of opportunity has opened, and Canada and others are advertising on billboards on Silicon Valley’s 101 freeway.

Tech companies’ shift to remote work coupled with climate change, the pandemic, China’s expansive authoritarianism and U.S. domestic politics make Finland surprisingly attractive. Now’s the time to act.

I recommend working with a service design firm on designing the fast track process.

I have not yet received a response.