HEUNI's senior researcher Natalia Ollus has been awarded a prize by the Turku University for her PhD (2016)
"In 2011 we at HEUNI were just about to launch our first major report on labour trafficking and the exploitation of migrant workers in the Baltic Sea region and I had become passionately interested in the topic. In my annual performance appraisal at work, my boss at the time, Kauko Aromaa, suggested to me that I do a PhD on this issue since it was something that I was interested in, and which I already knew a lot about. I thus embarked on a process which has taught me many things not only about trafficking and academic research, but also about myself."
The Turku University Foundation awarded a prize for the PhD by HEUNI's senior researcher Natalia Ollus for her outstanding doctoral thesis. The academic dissertation titled "From Forced Flexibility to Forced Labour: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Finland" (2016), reveals that the exploitation of migrant workers in the Finnish labour market is structural. The more serious forms of exploitation, such as trafficking, are born out of the overall misuse and exploitation of migrant workers. The research concludes that work-related exploitation should be defined as a form of corporate crime. The research was published as part of the HEUNI Report series. All HEUNI publications are available on our website or can be requested directly from HEUNI.