Documents Engblom, Samuel 5 results

"Since 1 July 2007, Swedish employers have no longer been required to provide an objective reason, such as the special nature of the work or a temporary peak in their business, when they hire someone on a fixed-term rather than an open-ended contract. The long list of different types of fixed-term contracts in the Employment Protection Act has been shortened, and a radical new type – fixed-term-at-will – has been introduced. Fixed-term-at-will marks a departure from earlier attempts to rein in fixed-term work by only allowing it when justified by some inherent characteristic of the work itself. Instead, the abuse of consecutive fixed-term contracts is to be prevented by time limits. An employee can work on fixed-term-at-will contracts for the same employer for up to two years during a five-year period. Through generous possibilities to combine fixed-term-at-will with the other remaining types of temporary contracts, substitute work and seasonal work, Sweden will have virtually no statutory protection against the abuse of successive temporary contracts. In the light of the ECJ's Adeneler judgment, it must therefore be questioned whether the Swedish regulation complies with directive 1999/70/EC."

"This article engages critically with an emergent rhetoric suggesting that Member States and trade unions seeking to apply their domestic social standards to foreign service providers, in the context of what EU lawyers refer to as ‘Free movement of Services', engage in practices amounting to economic protectionism. To countervail this rhetoric, the paper revisits some of the regulatory principles and rationales underpinning the law on ‘Free Movement of Workers' and draws a number of parallels between them and the principles that regulate, or ought to regulate, other freedoms that de facto involve the free circulation of working persons in Europe, albeit under the guise of ‘Free movement of Services' or ‘Freedom of Establishment'. It asserts that all market freedoms affecting the free movement rights of working persons in Europe, ought to be regulated by reference to what the paper describes as the ‘Equal treatment Principle', and should distance themselves from any ‘Country of Origin' rationale."

"The personal scope of Swedish labour law is almost exclusively defined by the concept of the employee. Few workers other than employees are covered. From a comparative perspective, the Swedish concept of employee is rather wide, and the exemptions from the personal scope are few. There are no intermediary categories between employees and self-employed workers, but the scope of e.g. some occupational safety and health regulations is extended to cover some self-employed workers. Swedish trade unions are allowed to organise self-employed workers and many unions do so. There are some examples of collective bargaining agreements covering or regulating the conditions of self-employed workers. "