Documents Sweden 1 908 results

"Using a regression discontinuity design, I evaluate an internationally unique policy in Sweden that rewarded equal division of parental leave with a cash bonus. The policy caused a small but significant reduction in the difference in days of leave between the parents. But since parent couples responded in different directions depending on the gender of the person with the lower uptake, the average effect on the mother-father difference in uptake was insignificant. Expectedly, given this result, the bonus did not affect average gender differences in earnings or indicators of later childcare responsibility. However, mothers who lowered their uptake of parental leave in response to the bonus displayed positive point estimates with regard to earnings while mothers who increased their uptake displayed negative estimates. This indicates that we cannot rule out a potential link between the length of parental leave and later allocation of time between home and market production. While the bonus did not affect average gender differences in parental leave and earnings, a key finding is that parents' division of parental leave can be affected by economic incentives, suggesting that better calibrated bonus programs have potential to be useful policy tools."
This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Focusing on the effects of union membership on partisan preferences, this article explores how changes in Swedish industrial relations and trade-union politics have affected electoral support for Left parties since the mid-1980s. Our analysis shows that unionization among blue-collar workers has declined sharply since the mid-1990 and that this development has contributed to the decline of electoral support for the Social Democrats and for the Swedish Left as a whole. In addition, we find that the association between union membership and voting for Left parties has declined among white-collar employees without tertiary education as well as blue-collar workers over the same period. We argue that sectoral blue-collar and white-collar unions alike have responded to membership losses and intensified competition between unions by engaging in practices that render the partisan preferences of union members less distinctive than what they used to be (less Left-leaning relative to non-unionized counterparts)."

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

"The recent literature on platform work and the welfare state has stressed that, despite being affected by high-income insecurity, platform workers cannot easily access social protection. However, it is unclear why platform workers encounter such barriers. This article offers an inductive and empirically based theoretical framework to investigate the obstacles faced by platform workers. It shows that the barriers experienced by platform workers depend on the eligibility criteria, the assessment criteria and the trade-off between taxation and social protection. The article substantiates these claims by offering both a policy analysis of formal arrangements and a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of welfare of 101 platform workers in Italy, Sweden and the UK during COVID-19. The research found that, while many platform workers attempted to access social protection during COVID-19, platform workers' access to social protection was affected by their positionality as outsiders, which clashes with the eligibility criteria (in Sweden and Italy); by the irregular nature of platform work, which contrasts with the rigidity of the assessment criteria (in the UK, Italy and Sweden); and by the implicit trade-off experienced by platform workers between minimising taxation and accessing to social protection (in the UK and Italy)."

"Drawing on more than a decade of inter-disciplinary research, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the available theories, concepts, data and research on new work organizations and the concept of work without boundaries . * Explores a concept of work that is not restricted by traditional organizational rules like regular office hours, a single workplace, fixed procedures and limited responsibility * Provides a comprehensive overview of the available theories, concepts, data and research on new work organizations * Examines the shift of power away from organizations to make individuals accountable for their own employability and work * Draws on over a decade of original research into work without boundaries in which the authors are key authorities * Brings together organization theory and work psychology with scholarship from related fields including sociology, social psychology, cognition and psychobiology"

"This book follows on from TUTB's 1994 study on how preventive provision was organised in the European Union of 12 Member States. The author, Laurent Vogel, applies the same analytical approach to the three newest members of the European Union as well as to Switzerland and Norway. Because the national situations encountered were so radically different, the different effects of transposition could be assessed in three sets of circumstances.
The first - the three Nordic countries studied - provided a key source of inspiration for Community legislation and met with few real legal difficulties. But these countries offered a way of gauging the Directives' adaptability to changing political and economic situations.
In Austria, the Directives were transplanted into a system very much focused on its origins in occupational risk insurance and a clear demarcation between private sector workers and public servants. In fact, the only major failing encountered in the Austrian transposition was the exclusion of the civil service.
Switzerland bore all the hallmarks of the Austrian system, plus its own specific industrial relations system and far more right-of-centre labour law lacking any serious guarantees of workers' collective rights. The fact that the Directives were transposed on a voluntary basis allows inherent areas of agreement and battle lines within the Directives to be examined in a specific national context.
Both the 1994 and the present publication form part of the activities being carried out in the framework of our Observatory on the transposition and application of directives, which will be brought to a close at the end of 1999 with the publication of a general report. "

"The survey was commissioned by the ETUC and carried out by Professors Countouris and De Stefano to explore options for new legal conceptual frameworks implied by the rise of ‘new forms of employment', and in particular from the growth of forms of work that fall outside traditional labour and social security protections.

The research has generated original data in the form of national reports from Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Germany and the UK. We therefore would like to thank those unions and national legal experts who provided feedback and material to the authors.

Starting with the question “who is a worker?”, the report identifies similarities and differences between the countries covered by the survey. In a following part, after a comparative perspective on the various legal status of self-employed workers, the researchers test national laws against various labour scenarios. The findings show that the self-employed category is increasingly populated by a heterogeneous group of workers with a weak position in the labour market which prevents them from having a strong organisational autonomy or independence in the marketplace.

The report also tackles the collective labour rights of self-employed workers as well as legal obstacles to collective bargaining due to restrictive interpretation of antitrust law.

In a final part it examines the various proposals and debates on this issue at national and EU level and as a conclusion it puts forward a proposal for a new “personal work relation” to be potentially supported by unions. This proposal defines the personal scope of application of labour law (broadly understood as including individual and collective labour law - therefore encompassing the right to organise and bargain collectively - but also employment equality law) as applicable to any person that is engaged by another to provide labour, unless that person is genuinely operating a business on her or his own account.

This extensive report will provide you with a useful insight and a comparative perspective on the situation of self-employed workers across Europe. This is even more important in view of the upcoming European elections, where the protection of all workers regardless of their status should be put at the centre of policy making."

"The paper provides an overview of government and social partner responses. In describing responses, the main goal of this paper is to identify the dimensions that can help explain the variety of responses, but also their commonalities. The paper also aims at understanding the factors that may have promoted the activation of social dialogue over economic and social policies and broaden the role of collective bargaining and industrial relations, as opposed to unilateral interventions designed by national governments. The paper lays out an analytical framework based on the COVID impact in each country, national industrial relations institutions and the nature of the government in office. In this general framework, we observe how national industrial relations institutions play a key role in explaining the responses in terms of the level and quality of social dialogue and the role of collective bargaining. Particularly important has been the role of strong sectoral collective bargaining institutions, allowing sectoral actors to negotiate specific responses considering the impact and the needs of the sector."