11 ms·

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing bu

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing business here. Granting unpaid leave to go try your own thing for a while is, from the employer's perspective, not any different. Some people never come back, most people do. The same is true for parental leave (many quit their jobs towards the end of their leave, if they had already been thinking about it). Even when they aren't required to grant it, larger Swedish companies will often give you unpaid leave if you just ask. The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill. Sweden has an enormous market of consultancies compared to the U.S. for filling these temporary gaps. Obviously consultants are expensive and not trained on your projects, so it's not the same as a long-time employee, but it gives options to "control the bleeding."

maxsilver 8y ago
> The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill. This is what a strong economy actually looks like. It's hard (in my experience) to get Americans to understand this, because our economy here has been so bad for so long, most people here have never experienced anything like this.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  It's like you need to grab Plato for a search and rescue mission to the cave.
- lkrubner 8y ago
  Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power. In a strong economy, the percentage of national income going to workers would increase, as it did from 1935 to 1973.
  - jhoechtl 8y ago
    This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?
    - lkrubner 8y ago
      See this graph: http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-26-at-11.30.08-AM.png http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree... A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-college-degree http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike-if-they-do-not-have-women http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-1958 http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?
    - rory096 8y ago
      The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits. https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-thirty-years https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    Additionally, in 1973, there was a good chance you had a partner who could stay at home to watch the kid(s). Now you have both people working whether you like it or not, because you're competing with two-income households for housing. Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing, but making it (on average) necessary for two people to work to afford a home when before it took one is a bad thing.
- 2019ideas 8y ago
  >This is what a strong economy actually looks like. No mention of wages and jobs. In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. Vacation policy? Unpaid, but at 60$/hr, I just afford to take 3 weeks of vacation, but 2 weeks of holidays too.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Congratulations on being in a high-demand field. It’s pretty great. But it’s definitely not the experience for most American workers.
    - hpkuarg 8y ago
      Is the Swedish case the same even for non-high demand fields? I suppose by definition every job (irrespective of compensation or skill needed) would be a high demand field if it takes 12 months to fill; at which point I suggest that what Sweden has is a demographics problem, not a strong economy.
      - deogeo 8y ago
        It's not a demographics problem from the point of view of the workers.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. When did that start? I left EE in about 2006 because I felt like all the employers were very demanding of specific skillsets and treated engineers like they were easily replaceable.
- hopefulengineer 8y ago
  No, the US economy is strong. The problem is that big business lobbies for more H1B and illegal immigration to increase supply of labor and thus reduce wages and benefits. You also have cases of collusion like FAANG working together to suppress wages The State of the Union is a prime example of how they rationalize it, with Trump saying "Our unemployment rate is too low" and that's why we need more immigration. That's how you get 40 years of stagnant wages and rising income inequality, every time the labor market tightens up we bring in more people Meanwhile our workforce participation rate is below 70%. If wages rose people might actually come back into the workforce.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  >This is what a strong economy actually looks like. Is it actually though? Couldn't it also be a sign of an aging population? Sweden's population is growing, but it's mostly due to immigration. Considering the type of immigration that's mostly happening it's not bringing in lots of skilled workers.
  - netjiro 8y ago
    Partially anecdotal: The problem with hiring is from what I've seen not due to ageing population. Instead, due to very protective employment regulation employers in Sweden are absurdly slow and picky when hiring. Resulting in a very large temp staffing sector. They are also surprisingly conservative in expectations. Contrasting anecdotal rant: In 2014-2018 I was trying to help a Swedish company get a tech dev project going. They needed to bring in about five experts. For years this project was delayed until it was no longer relevant, because they had a pointlessly limited view on who they needed to hire, at what cost and under which structure. They would not accept a 15% salary increase above their opinion of the norm, and neither a distributed project nor a collaborative partner network construct. This loss of opportunity was huge for them. During the same time I was staffing, running, and completing two projects in Switzerland, total of 25ppl. No issues, quick handling, excellent outcome. The Swiss investors understood that it's ok to run a project distributed across five countries and pay an extra 20-50% if it's difficult to find good people locally in a given field. Skill and speed is more important than location, cost, surname, language[2], etc. This is not the only such situation I've come across in Sweden. I work as an R&D consultant specialised in setting up and running distributed collaborative high risk tech projects. Despite being a native Swede it's easier for me to run projects in Switzerland than in Sweden. Kind of sad. For your second point: For skilled immigrants (stem university degree) the situation is quite good. From what I've heard, 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and onward tend to outperform the "native" population. This may change in Sweden after the large influx of unskilled refugees in the last 20-30 years, vs the predominantly work based immigration of 1950-1980s. Statistically [1]: Sweden has one of the highest gaps in unemployment between European and non-European unskilled immigrants. If you're uneducated you _really_ should migrate to somewhere else if you _ever_ want to get a job. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigration_to_Sweden/0/034d473a17022b320351362d653c1fe34b0bccf0.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigrat... 2: as long as they know English well enough :)
zmodem 8y ago
I think the proper English word for this role is contractor rather than consultant.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  Is it? I thought that a contractor is usually someone who is self-employed, whereas consultants are employed by a consultancy.
  - ThirdFoundation 8y ago
    It's confusing and depends on the industry. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. In some disciplines consultants literally just 'consult' and don't fill a role. In the accounting world we have employees that we call 'contractors' but they aren't self-employed. Rather, they are employed by a specific accounting staffing agency that contracts with our firm to fill positions temporarily. Sometimes contractors are employed by the company they are working with directly but the position isn't guaranteed to last before Basically, like much of the English language, there isn't a hard rule. I imagine there are country, regional, and industry specific uses for the terms. There may have once been a hard distinction, but misuse of terms eventually permeates into local parlance, which gives way to a new accepted use of the term.
CorvusCrypto 8y ago
I think it depends on the company too. For tech companies especially in Stockholm and Malmö, It's really easy to hire developers. If it's a startup good luck getting unpaid leave during huge rushes as well as during industrisemester. So of course as always it depends. However the thing I think that is more unique to Sweden and drives these kind of nice benefits is that it's really hard to get rid of an employee. Employees are protected so much with rules and regulations that even if you get let go you have a required three month grace period unless otherwise negotiated with the employee. It's not uncommon I would say to see tech workers "fired" but then still on the payroll for an extra 2 months while they are arbetsbefriad (paid leave) Pretty nice if you know how to game the system

maxsilver 8y ago

> The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill. This is what a strong economy actually looks like. It's hard (in my experience) to get Americans to understand this, because our economy here has been so bad for so long, most people here have never experienced anything like this.

CalRobert 8y ago
It's like you need to grab Plato for a search and rescue mission to the cave.
lkrubner 8y ago
Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power. In a strong economy, the percentage of national income going to workers would increase, as it did from 1935 to 1973.
- jhoechtl 8y ago
  This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    See this graph: http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-26-at-11.30.08-AM.png http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree... A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-college-degree http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike-if-they-do-not-have-women http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike... http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-1958 http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?
  - rory096 8y ago
    The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits. https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-thirty-years https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Additionally, in 1973, there was a good chance you had a partner who could stay at home to watch the kid(s). Now you have both people working whether you like it or not, because you're competing with two-income households for housing. Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing, but making it (on average) necessary for two people to work to afford a home when before it took one is a bad thing.
2019ideas 8y ago
>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. No mention of wages and jobs. In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. Vacation policy? Unpaid, but at 60$/hr, I just afford to take 3 weeks of vacation, but 2 weeks of holidays too.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Congratulations on being in a high-demand field. It’s pretty great. But it’s definitely not the experience for most American workers.
  - hpkuarg 8y ago
    Is the Swedish case the same even for non-high demand fields? I suppose by definition every job (irrespective of compensation or skill needed) would be a high demand field if it takes 12 months to fill; at which point I suggest that what Sweden has is a demographics problem, not a strong economy.
    - deogeo 8y ago
      It's not a demographics problem from the point of view of the workers.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me. When did that start? I left EE in about 2006 because I felt like all the employers were very demanding of specific skillsets and treated engineers like they were easily replaceable.
hopefulengineer 8y ago
No, the US economy is strong. The problem is that big business lobbies for more H1B and illegal immigration to increase supply of labor and thus reduce wages and benefits. You also have cases of collusion like FAANG working together to suppress wages The State of the Union is a prime example of how they rationalize it, with Trump saying "Our unemployment rate is too low" and that's why we need more immigration. That's how you get 40 years of stagnant wages and rising income inequality, every time the labor market tightens up we bring in more people Meanwhile our workforce participation rate is below 70%. If wages rose people might actually come back into the workforce.
Mirioron 8y ago
>This is what a strong economy actually looks like. Is it actually though? Couldn't it also be a sign of an aging population? Sweden's population is growing, but it's mostly due to immigration. Considering the type of immigration that's mostly happening it's not bringing in lots of skilled workers.
- netjiro 8y ago
  Partially anecdotal: The problem with hiring is from what I've seen not due to ageing population. Instead, due to very protective employment regulation employers in Sweden are absurdly slow and picky when hiring. Resulting in a very large temp staffing sector. They are also surprisingly conservative in expectations. Contrasting anecdotal rant: In 2014-2018 I was trying to help a Swedish company get a tech dev project going. They needed to bring in about five experts. For years this project was delayed until it was no longer relevant, because they had a pointlessly limited view on who they needed to hire, at what cost and under which structure. They would not accept a 15% salary increase above their opinion of the norm, and neither a distributed project nor a collaborative partner network construct. This loss of opportunity was huge for them. During the same time I was staffing, running, and completing two projects in Switzerland, total of 25ppl. No issues, quick handling, excellent outcome. The Swiss investors understood that it's ok to run a project distributed across five countries and pay an extra 20-50% if it's difficult to find good people locally in a given field. Skill and speed is more important than location, cost, surname, language[2], etc. This is not the only such situation I've come across in Sweden. I work as an R&D consultant specialised in setting up and running distributed collaborative high risk tech projects. Despite being a native Swede it's easier for me to run projects in Switzerland than in Sweden. Kind of sad. For your second point: For skilled immigrants (stem university degree) the situation is quite good. From what I've heard, 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and onward tend to outperform the "native" population. This may change in Sweden after the large influx of unskilled refugees in the last 20-30 years, vs the predominantly work based immigration of 1950-1980s. Statistically [1]: Sweden has one of the highest gaps in unemployment between European and non-European unskilled immigrants. If you're uneducated you _really_ should migrate to somewhere else if you _ever_ want to get a job. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigration_to_Sweden/0/034d473a17022b320351362d653c1fe34b0bccf0.png https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigrat... 2: as long as they know English well enough :)

zmodem 8y ago

I think the proper English word for this role is contractor rather than consultant.

jakobegger 8y ago
Is it? I thought that a contractor is usually someone who is self-employed, whereas consultants are employed by a consultancy.
- ThirdFoundation 8y ago
  It's confusing and depends on the industry. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. In some disciplines consultants literally just 'consult' and don't fill a role. In the accounting world we have employees that we call 'contractors' but they aren't self-employed. Rather, they are employed by a specific accounting staffing agency that contracts with our firm to fill positions temporarily. Sometimes contractors are employed by the company they are working with directly but the position isn't guaranteed to last before Basically, like much of the English language, there isn't a hard rule. I imagine there are country, regional, and industry specific uses for the terms. There may have once been a hard distinction, but misuse of terms eventually permeates into local parlance, which gives way to a new accepted use of the term.

CorvusCrypto 8y ago

I think it depends on the company too. For tech companies especially in Stockholm and Malmö, It's really easy to hire developers. If it's a startup good luck getting unpaid leave during huge rushes as well as during industrisemester. So of course as always it depends. However the thing I think that is more unique to Sweden and drives these kind of nice benefits is that it's really hard to get rid of an employee. Employees are protected so much with rules and regulations that even if you get let go you have a required three month grace period unless otherwise negotiated with the employee. It's not uncommon I would say to see tech workers "fired" but then still on the payroll for an extra 2 months while they are arbetsbefriad (paid leave) Pretty nice if you know how to game the system