Ylva and UniCafe declare themselves discrimination-free zones
12.5.2022
Ylva and UniCafe are highlighting their strong commitment to equality and non-discrimination by declaring their facilities and work community discrimination-free zones. To mark this declaration, you can find a Discrimination-Free Zone sign in all our premises.
The national Discrimination-Free Zone campaign opposes all kinds of discrimination, bullying and harassment. The campaign can be joined by any organisation or work community that wants to declare its commitment to the non-discrimination principle.
At Ylva, no one is treated differently based on their gender, age, ethnic or national origin, language, religion, belief, sexual orientation, family relations, disability, state of health, opinion, trade union or political activity, or any other personal characteristic.
“Joining the Discrimination-Free Zone campaign is a natural continuation of our equality work, which made it easy for us to commit to the campaign’s content and message. Non-discrimination has been a central value to us for a long time, and we hope the Discrimination-Free Zone signs will contribute to making our work and desire more visible to our customers and collaborators as well,” states Ylva’s Culture & People Officer Aino Pekkarinen.
Discrimination-Free Zone signs help communicate Ylva’s values
Ylva’s ethical guidelines and operating principles have been compiled into our Code of Conduct guidelines (in Finnish). We are also legally obliged to promote equality and prevent discrimination in the workplace. The measures aiming for this are recorded in Ylva’s equality plan.
For reporting any grievances, we have set up an anonymous notification channel through which any employee, customer, collaborator or anyone else following Ylva’s operations can give us feedback or inform us of any grievances they have noticed. On our construction sites, we are promoting inclusivity also through our Inclusive Construction Site project that started in 2019.
“I believe the Discrimination-Free Zone signs play an important communicative role in the creation of safe spaces, since they make our work culture and operating methods visible in a whole new way,” summarises Pekkarinen.
We want to have as many people with different backgrounds as possible to work for us, regardless of their gender, age, ethnic background, religion or belief, opinion, state of health, disability or sexual orientation.
In order to learn more about diversity and its acceptance, we organised equality training for our entire personnel in early 2022. The training was carried out in collaboration with the Helsinki Pride community, who have been a partner of ours for more than two years now.
Declaring a discrimination-free zone is a concrete way for us to make our commitment to the non-discrimination principle visible to our customers, collaborators and employees alike.
More information:
Aino Pekkarinen
Culture & People Officer
+358 40 542 4626
aino.pekkarinen@ylva.fi
The Discrimination-Free Zone campaign has been planned and implemented jointly by the Finnish Multicultural Sports Federation Fimu, the Finnish Disability Forum, the Finnish League for Human Rights, Seta, the Finnish National Youth Council Allianssi and the Ministry of Justice. Declaring a discrimination-free zone means opposition to discrimination, addressing any arising problems and recognising equality between all human beings.
More about the campaign: https://yhdenvertaisuus.fi/en/discriminationfree.fi
