In the late summer of 2015, I started a rumour that went around the world and reinforced the prejudices about Scandinavia held by tens of millions of people.
It began with the best of intentions. I was still new to Sweden, where I had followed my wife-to-be and started a new life as a freelance reporter after some comfortable desk jobs in the London media. Now I believed I had discovered a good story, so on a sunny August morning I set off to investigate.
My friend Daniel, a photojournalist and outdoors enthusiast, picked me up in his red Volvo estate, normally full of mountain bikes, surfboards or rock-climbing equipment. We drove across the Älvsborg suspension bridge at the mouth of the Göta river as the sun shone on its playful, eggshell green girders. Towards the horizon, a line of vast wind turbines revolved slowly, perched among dark knuckles of rock where the granite coast crumbles into the sea. This was Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city and now my home.
We pulled up on a leafy cul-de-sac among the tall birches that surround Svartedalen retirement home, a red brick block in an area better known for its poverty and gang violence. I got out my notepad and Daniel his camera. This unlikely setting was an experiment in the future of work. For the past six months, the elderly care nurses had been working a six-hour day, instead of the usual eight, for the same wage.
Since the 1990s, Svartedalen had been facing more work with fewer and fewer staff. ‘We can’t do it any more,’ Ann-Charlotte Dahlbom Larsson, who ran the home, told us. ‘There is a lot of illness and depression among staff in the care sector because of exhaustion, the lack of balance between work and life is not good for anyone.’ Already, she said, on the six-hour day staff were feeling noticeably better, but the standard of care had also improved. The new arrangement was likely to be more expensive – the home had hired extra nurses to cover the gaps left by the shorter working hours.
Lise-Lotte Pettersson, an assistant nurse, showed us around, taking a moment along the way to dance tenderly with an elderly man. Caring for the residents, some of whom had dementia, demanded constant vigilance and creativity, and with a six-hour day Lise-Lotte could sustain a higher standard of care, she said: ‘I used to be exhausted all the time, I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa. But not now. I am much more alert: I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life.’
I first learned about this experiment from a political flyer stuck to the wall of a tram stop near our flat. The country was preparing for an election, and with the help of Google Translate I was trying to understand what was going on. A bleak and soulless street corner opposite the cemetery, with its injunction to ‘Think about Death’ inscribed over the gates, seemed like a dismal place for a declaration about the future of humanity. But there it was: something called the Left Party, whoever they were, wanted a six-hour working day. I wanted to be on a beach in the Bahamas, but there was about an equal chance of either of those things happening, I thought. And I got on the tram.
But somehow, here in this wet and windy city on the northern edge of the planet, the idea found a hearing. Gothenburg city council, run by the centre-left Social Democrats who have dominated Swedish politics since the 1930s, agreed to a small experiment at the nursing home. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, a Toyota servicing centre had moved to a six-hour day more than a decade before, leading to lower staff turnover, more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs. I trawled the web and found a couple of small businesses that were also using a shorter working day – and bingo! – I had a story.
Sweden itself was about to turn into a much more urgent international story, as the country opened its doors during the coming months to 163,000 refugees from the wars in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But as for my little story about shorter working hours, the genie was out of the bottle. It turned out that my feature about Lise-Lotte and some Toyota mechanics appealed to every prejudice that we hold about Sweden, the land of Abba and IKEA, of blonde hair and blue eyes, of sex and socialism and Scandi silliness. Scotland was the first to take notice. The Herald wrote:
What have these wacky Scandinavians been up to now? I will tell you what: experimenting with a six-hour working day, that’s what. A typical Britisher will think: ‘Six-hour working day? That’s immoral. First, it was pornography. Now this. The Scandinavians need reining in.’ … We cannot believe everything they do in Scandinavia is good and everything we do is bad, despite all the evidence. But it’s nice to have a beacon of hope, however illusory. And the thought that somebody somewhere is trying to organise society on sane lines gives us courage to carry on in Barmy Britannia.
During the Cold War, the idea that things could be different, that society could be organised along alternative lines, was often connected to Russia. But after the Soviet monolith collapsed and Putin reigned over a regime of ruthless oligarchs, we were left with… Sweden. My story spread like wildfire, to Ireland across Britain, and the US. The New York Times even sent a reporter to Gothenburg.
I had gone viral. It hit a breathless peak of nonsense almost exactly a year after my story first appeared, when the website Smart is the New Sexy issued a 40-second Facebook video montage of cheesy Swedish images, actually including a cheese fondue (N.B. that’s Switzerland, not Sweden), which declared: ‘Sweden is officially moving to a six-hour working day.’ It was sent to me by an old school friend envious that fate had carried me to this blesséd haven. The last time I looked, that video had been viewed 42 million times.
So what became of the six-hour day in Sweden? As we might have expected, the experiment at Svartedalen came to a close in 2017. Short-term labour costs were up 20 per cent, while the gains were less tangible and quantifiable. The mountain of hype gave birth to a mouse. But the story spoke to our assumptions that in Scandinavia they do things differently, that work might not be just about growing the bottom line, and that a better, richer life might not be just a side effect of the pursuit of profit, but something that can be planned for and worked towards. Could the ‘balance’ between work and life – a juxtaposition that itself says so much about what work means to most of us – in fact be balanced towards life? And could work, instead of being an end in itself (i.e., the opposite of being out of work) become a means to a fuller life? Productivity in the industrialised world has doubled since the 1970s, so technically we have the potential for a much shorter working day; it’s a question of how these productivity gains are distributed.
Like all prejudices, if you look only at the surface of things you can find evidence to back up any theory you like. But perhaps our assumptions about Scandinavia contain a speck of truth around which the pearl of myth has coalesced. I remember my first day at work in the journalism department at the University of Gothenburg. I left my office door ajar. Around 4pm I began to hear calls echoing down the corridor. Around 6pm I stepped out for a coffee to find the place deserted. The noises had been cries of ‘Hej då!’, or goodbye, as staff went home just as I was settling down for a few more hours at my desk, as I had been accustomed to in London. You could be forgiven for thinking this was academia, where the work-life balance might be taken to an extreme. In fact, as I was to find out to my own cost, Swedish universities are tough places to work, with high levels of stress and instability, and staff employed on rolling short-term contracts for years on end. I lost my first job at the university after budget cuts, and I was last in, so first out.
All the same, a working day of 8am to 4pm was observed by most university staff, including an hour for lunch, during which the doors to the building locked automatically, making it physically impossible for students – perish the thought – to disturb tutors during their break. The head of the department at the time also had a strategy of ‘management by fika’, meaning that the twice-daily breaks for coffee and buns, known as fika in Swedish, were useful opportunities for staff to share thoughts about their work, and to bond as a team. And it seemed to work. At one of my part-time jobs at a Swedish company, my boss complained that she found it hard to get hold of senior management after 3pm on Fridays because they were already on their boats.
To say anything meaningful about Sweden, however, we need to look below the surface. I wanted to talk to the people at the heart of the country’s economy and find out what, if any, are the key features that make it distinctive. For decades, people have referred to a ‘Swedish model’ of running society, without being too clear about what they mean. I’ll try to clarify whether there is indeed a Swedish model in the economy, and, if so, what makes it different from other nations. I will look in some detail at the world of work also, because that is where the Swedish model stands or falls. Work is where the wealth is generated to pay for the shorter hours, the holidays, the parental leave, the welfare benefits, everything that constitutes Swedish society and which contributes to our visions of it – or perhaps, how we would like it to be. When people talk about the short working week in France, it is often in terms of how much damage it does to the economy. So is Sweden different? And if so, how? And why?
The person most responsible for popularising the notion that Sweden is unusual was the American journalist Marquis Childs. Childs came to Sweden in 1933 as a young man, and wrote Sweden: The Middle Way (1936). He arrived in the country via a Germany in the grip of the Nazi takeover. To the east, Stalin’s forced collectivisation had generated mass starvation, while the Kremlin was preparing itself to unleash itself for the horror of the purges and the Gulag. Meanwhile, his homeland, the US was in the depths of the Great Depression. The horrors of World War II were rapidly approaching, so the notion of a ‘middle way’ between capitalism and socialism, ‘a spectacle of sanity and stability that other nations may study with profit’, found a ready audience. Childs wrote: ‘It is perhaps this orderly surface of Swedish life that first attracts the visitor who comes from a world in which violent extremes contend for power, in a civilisation that must by comparison seem still amorphous.’
Today, there is a whiff of the 1930s in Europe – the shock-waves from the 2008 financial crash, extremes of wealth and poverty, authoritarianism in the saddle in Moscow, Warsaw and Budapest, war in east Ukraine, and parties on the far-right and left shaking the political establishment. In Washington, Donald Trump has upended all our certainties about the United States, creating a renewed interest in whether capitalism can be done differently, rather than the low tax, small-state solutions favoured by the US president. Sweden itself has seen a radical nationalist party make recent electoral gains, suggesting that the country is not immune to global trends. But it remains a relatively peaceful, open, prosperous country, the economic powerhouse of Scandinavia. This is a book about how people are creating Sweden’s wealth – the ultimate guarantor of peace and normality.
Discussions of Sweden tend to be over-politicised. The left in Europe decided 25 years ago that the Swedish model had failed. The main finding of this book is that it has not, but it has changed. On the political right, a generation ago Sweden seemed so closely associated with leftism that it made more sense to scrap all talk of a ‘model’, rather than trying to reform it. Another finding of this book is that Sweden’s reputation as a poster-child for the left is mistaken; many of the model’s features appeal strongly to business, and the right has a case for reclaiming it as its own. One should bear in mind that for 13 of the past 28 years (at the time of writing, in 2019), Sweden has been governed by parties of the centre-right. Left and right should take credit – and share blame – for how the new Swedish model looks today.
After moving to Sweden, I spent three happy years as one of The Guardian’s go-to reporters for Scandinavia stories, and the paper seemingly couldn’t get enough. The Financial Times and The New York Times also turned to me from time to time. So I covered a hunt for a Russian submarine off Stockholm, women brewers in Gothenburg, the Julian Assange rape case, asylum and immigration, Sweden’s wine industry, the property market, moose hunting, the rise of the far-right, terrorism, developments in Finnish teaching and social care, business and politics. I even reported on the Swedish passion for ‘drive-in bingo’, much loved in the countryside on long summer evenings, where hundreds of people line up their cars in a field while the caller shouts the numbers over a loud speaker.
I came to the subject of Sweden with very few preconceived notions and almost no idea about what I would find. I spent most of the 1990s in Russia – another cold, dark country covered in pine trees. When fate drove me north once more in 2013, at first I couldn’t help feeling that I was back in the USSR – more pickled fish and mashed potato, vodka-like inebriants, echelons of apartment blocks and impenetrable forests. It took a while for me to shake off my Russian hangover and see Sweden with clear eyes. The interviews for this book were part of that journey. Most of the time I just tapped the recording icon on my phone and let people speak. Some of my most naive questions – ‘So is there a Swedish model then?’ – turned out to be the most productive, either because people had different or conflicting answers, or because the issues were so simple and obvious that they had never thought about them properly before. This was a voyage of discovery. Was the country as perfect as envious friends back home in Brexit Britain seemed to think? Perfekt, the Swedes would say. Well, almost.