On Monday, SD Worx published a survey with the provocative title “Finnish employers are not interested in equal pay.” Many outlets picked up the same angle. Even Helsingin Sanomat’s editorial wrote: “According to the study, Finnish employers are not really interested in eliminating income inequality.”
Equal pay and pay transparency are unquestionably important. That’s why the upcoming EU Pay Transparency Directive requires companies to ensure equal pay not only for the same work but also for work of equal value—and, where differences exist, to justify them.
We don’t believe this is primarily about employers’ bad intentions. The real issue is that comparing work of equal value is hard. Most large companies use multiple job-evaluation approaches: some stem from collective agreements (with differing criteria, some without criteria alltogether), and others are commercial systems for specialists and management. Cross-system comparison is difficult.
The field of HR is evolving fast, with many AI-enabled tools emerging. Yet many of these assume a clean slate or overwrite existing structures—rarely realistic in established organizations.
Fairness & Friends takes a different approach: work with what companies already have. There’s no need to discard collective-agreement criteria or commercial grading. The key is to make these systems “talk” to one another in a comparable way.
Together with Reaktor, we are developing a tool to do exactly that. It also automates adjacent workflows—such as creating job descriptions and keeping them systematically up to date.
Our SaaS product isn’t public yet. The technology is being piloted with a Finnish company, and we can already deploy parts of it for specific use cases with light tailoring. If you’re interested, please reach out at ai@fairnessandfriends.fi.
Minna, Sanni and I have had a chance to work with an exceptional development team together with experts from Reaktor: Marko Aalto (VP, Data & AI), Wolf Angyal (Machine Learning Engineer), Panu Korhonen (Design Director, GenAI), Henrik Aalto (Senior Consultant, Data & AI), and Gonzalo Borobio (Software Architect). And of course the whole Reaktor Ecosystem team, Samuli Savo, Riikka Uimonen, Tuike Järvi, and Rose Marie Rusanen.
