For Gunilla Stensson life was looking good. She had a steady job as a web developer, living with her daughter in a picturesque village in Bohuslän, the stunning wilderness on Sweden’s west coast. Gothenburg was a simple train ride away. A short walk from home was a sandy beach belonging to one of the thousands of lakes that scatter Sweden’s glacial landscape. In 20 minutes she could be island-hopping on the archipelago, where the coast slowly dissolves into the limpid waters of the Kattegat.
But then, a new boss at Stensson’s work demanded change, and the office moved to Stockholm. For Gunilla, with her daughter at a local school and her life so settled, that meant only one thing – she was out of a job. At first, things seemed rosy. Stensson became self-employed and began dreaming of an independent life with her own business. But then the bad luck began. A job offer seemed less risky and stressful than going freelance. It turned out to be the opposite – the following year she suffered a breakdown. She tried to ease herself back into work with part-time study, but a student grant quickly ran out. Dozens of job applications ended in rejection. And on top of all that, her former husband was no longer sharing their daughter’s upbringing.
Four years into her crisis, Stensson found herself alone, aged 47, with no business, no job, no money, and no self-confidence. A support group with other unemployed people only reinforced the doubts she had about herself, namely that she was a single mother living in the sticks who had been out of work for a long time. ‘I was really down,’ she says. ‘I can understand people who think about suicide when they lose their job.’ There were so many people looking for jobs in her line of work, and her confidence was low. She felt she hadn’t had proper employment for almost five years, and her skills were out of date.
But Stensson had a lifeline. Her original employer subscribed to Trygghetsrådet, or TRR, which loosely translates as the Security Agency. This is a partnership between employers and the unions that provides expert support to workers who have lost their jobs. The agency commits to work for five years with a person to get them back on track. Stensson turned to them and was assigned a counsellor, whom she met every couple of weeks. TRR also paid for a course of psychotherapy. She says: ‘I felt all the time that they believed in me, that was the key point. I felt I was worthless. I was not getting any interviews. But they didn’t look at that part of me, only at that part of me that does have knowledge and skills.’
As soon as she took the decision that she didn’t want her own business but wanted a job instead, TRR started guiding her in that direction, but not in an aggressive way: ‘It was as if they knew where I was and could support me at each point,’ Stensson says. ‘Their approach was to actually get this person going again, not just to get rid of them as fast as possible.’ When at last she was invited to an interview, TRR arranged coaching over Skype while she was out of town. Her sister-in-law took her to buy a new outfit, and she nailed the job.
Barely a year later, Stensson flashes a confident smile over lunch in Gothenburg, where she is taking a break from her new job. She looks every bit the sassy internet professional, with a job in the healthcare system – she is calm and engaged, able to talk openly about her recent problems without embarrassment or self-pity. ‘It felt so easy after I went to TRR,’ Stensson giggles. ‘There was a shift inside me, I found my confidence again – that was the big thing I got from it. I don’t know what would have happened without them. It was so important to have someone who kept believing in me.’
Stensson’s story is just one among those of the many thousands of Swedish workers who find themselves out of a job each year, and who make their way to a job-security agency such as TRR. When Beate Autrum first heard that she was getting laid off from the factory where she worked in 2014, she was mortified – she had moved to Sweden from Germany to work for the company, and she worried about how she would support her daughter as a single parent, and whether she would have to leave Sweden altogether. But she soon found out about TRR and, like Stensson, was given a personal counsellor to help her transition into a new job. ‘I’m so glad that TRR existed,’ she told The Atlantic magazine. ‘You get this feeling, of aha, this is not the end of the world. There will be a chance for me.’ Autrum soon found work at another company.
When we think about Sweden’s famously generous welfare state (see Chapter 16), we tend to imagine tax payer-funded benefits, including those for the unemployed. But job-security agencies – trygghetsfonder in Swedish, known collectively as the transition system, or omställningssystem – are a unique and largely hidden aspect of the county’s welfare set-up, funded entirely by employers. TRR, one of the largest, is backed by about 35,000 private sector companies with nearly 1 million employees, almost a quarter of the workforce.
Companies typically pay 0.3 per cent of their wage bill each year into the security agencies, of which there are ten. In good years for the economy, when layoffs are low, money swells the agencies’ coffers as insurance against the bad times. On average, TRR spends around £2,200 on each person who turns to it for help, but that figure conceals wide variations – the agency places no limits on the amount it will spend on training and counselling to get someone back into work. It also tops up the unemployment benefit paid out by the state and trade union unemployment insurance schemes. ‘Our goal,’ says TRR, ‘is to try and make sure the time from one job to another should be as short, effective and as meaningful as possible.’ Sweden’s system is distinct from Denmark’s ‘flexicurity’ model, which has less employment protection.
The provision of welfare is too often associated with handouts. In Sweden, looking after people during difficult times is a long way from this. The country’s transition system, with the job-security agencies at its heart, is an important part of explaining how Sweden’s economy maintains its global competitiveness, despite such an apparently well-paid workforce. Helping the unemployed back into work, enabling them to improve their skills or recover from the stresses of redundancy, and making sure they are not penniless during the process has a strict economic rationale. Job-security agencies are good for employers because they make unions more willing to accede to layoffs when competition demands it, according to Carina Lindfelt of the Confederation of Swedish Employers. ‘It’s easy to have those negotiations, since you know on both sides that these people that will be laid off will get such professional support,’ she told The Atlantic. Employers feel less guilty about layoffs, too. Sweden’s employment minister Ylva Johansson told The New York Times: ‘In Sweden, if you ask a union leader, “Are you afraid of new technology?”, they will answer, “No, I’m afraid of old technology.” The jobs disappear, and then we train people for new jobs. We won’t protect jobs. But we will protect workers.’
To understand how this unique system – a sort of private welfare state within the welfare state – has come about, we must look briefly at the origins of Sweden’s unusual labour market, where the focus is on protecting the individual worker, rather than protecting his or her job. This is a story of the rise, fall and improbable rise again of a unique feature of the way Sweden does business.