Mr. Chairman,
Mr. Director General,
Honorable Ministers,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for the invitation to this important and inspiring event. It is a privilege and a pleasure for me to be here and give you a picture of Swedish labour market policy. I will focus on the role of labour market policy in the context of structural changes and the role the social partners have in the Swedish Labour Market policy.

Let me start with the roll of labour market policy in the case of company closures.

Structural changes are acceptable to the people only when this process does not result in a big increase in unemployment of social hardship.

Every government has to make an important choice of strategy when this crisis appears. Shall the market solve the problem and the government just pays handouts, or should we use political measures to make the market operate in such a way that unemployment can be prevented? This is a choice between a handout strategy and an employment strategy.

In Sweden, we give full priority to the employment strategy and labour market policies can play an important role in assisting unemployment in finding new jobs in existing or expanding firms. This principle is at the core of the European Union’s employment strategy.

In the case of large plant closures, the recommendation based on our experience is that it is necessary that the local employment office must be notified in due time and should set up a temporary office in the plant to facilitate the transfer of redundant labor to new jobs or, if necessary, give assistance with training, vocational rehabilitation or other measures.

In Sweden, besides the public employment service, we also have something called Career transition agreements and employment security agreements. These are collective agreements whose purpose is to help workers who become redundant due to lack of work to find new jobs. They take part in an active transition process that may start when they are given notice, or in some cases even earlier.

An example of how to use all these instruments in a concrete situation can illustrate these agreements.

When a company makes a redundancy notice they report it to the County Labor Board. They in turn notify the Employment Office who immediately takes a contact with the company and the Employee labor organization. The next step is that financial resources are allocated within the region if necessary. The Employment Office together with a representative for one or more Career transition agreements make a visit at the company and discuss the service they can offer and how to come in contact with them.

For some an Action Plan is made and they get all the information they need about what is expected of them and what they can in return. It is now time to seriously start applying for jobs if they haven’t started already.

Examples of the schemes that the Employment Offices can offer are financial support when an unemployed starts an enterprise, vocational training, and financial support to employers that hire long-term unemployed and support for geographical mobility.

The Employment Office also provide training in job-seeking including everything from finding out what you really want to do and what qualifications you have, applying for jobs to practicing interviews in front of a VCR and discussions about dress codes and how to behave in an interview. And finally there is an internet-based self-service system when people themselves can find a job.

I will now go on to talk about tripartite cooperation in Sweden.

It is a Swedish tradition to organize labour market policy on a tripartite basis at all levels, national, regional and local. Experience has shown that cooperation between the state and the social partners improves the implementation of the policy. There are good reasons for this.

One is that all the important questions are discussed by the social partners. This has among other things facilitated the introduction of new techniques and has also served to enhance the trade unions understanding of the need for labour market adjustments.

Another reason is that the implementation of the labour market programmers on local levels will be furthered by the fact that union and employers take part in the decision-making and are members of the boards.

The third reason is that this cooperation leads to a more long-term stable labour market policy.

Finally I would like to bring into light an important but often forgotten effect of the cooperation. A free trade union that is a part of the shaping and evaluation of the labour market policy measures is a very important guarantee against corruption and abuse of the economical resources that are allocated to a local level.