The Swedish-speaking population in Finland constitutes a linguistic minority in numbers, but has equal constitutional rights with the Finnish-speaking majority. In the J 9th century, Swedish was the dominant language af government, business and culture. At present, though, the two language groups have almost the same distributions by industry and socioeconomic position at the national level. Generally, the differences between regions are wider than between the two language groups. The labor force participation rate is also very much the same. The unemployment rate, however, is clearly lower among Swedish speakers and retirement at an early age (i.e. disability pension) less common. These disparities remain also after a great number ofbackground variables have been controlled for.