Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Labour law Sweden“

Sweden used to be one of the most restrictive countries in the Organisation of Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in terms of labour immigration policy. This was drastically changed in 2008 when a very liberal immigration law was passed. Why did one of the most restrictive labour immigration countries suddenly become one of the most liberal ones? The article argues that it is necessary to consider labour market institutions and their consequences for labour migration. These factors will influence the preferences, strategies and chances of success for various policy actors. A decline in union power and corporatism in Sweden had important consequences for its labour immigration. Following this decline, employers and centre-right parties became more active and adopted more liberal policy positions than previously. The article analyses policy developments since the 1960s and draws on official documents, position statements, party manifestos, media coverage and original elite interviews.

This paper explores trade union strategies to protect wages in the face of EU migration after the enlargement of the European Union. We argue that unions have three instruments at their disposal to deal with the risks linked to downward wage pressure: closure through immigration control, equalisation through collective bargaining and minimum wages, and the organisation of migrant workers. Using comparative case studies of Sweden, Germany and the UK, we show how different types of power resources shape union strategies: unions with substantial organisational resources (in Sweden) relied on a large membership to pursue an equalisation strategy and expected to be able to ‘afford’ openness. German unions with low membership but access to the political system pushed for a mix of closure and equality drawing on political intervention (e.g. minimum wages). British unions, unable to pursue either, focused their efforts on organisation.

AbstractThis comparative review of age as a protected ground in discrimination law explores the underpinning questions and themes related to two main dimensions of age discrimination. The first dimension is structural, economic and labour market driven, whereby age is used to allocate a range of rights, obligations and benefits within society. The second is the social justice and equality dimension, in which age is understood as an aspect of individual identity that is worthy of protection against indignity or detriment. The review then considers the law on age discrimination in a number of jurisdictions, the EU law, the UK, Sweden, USA, Canada and South Africa, and assesses the extent to which the underpinning questions explain the developing case law.

One counterintuitive variation in wage-setting regulation is that countries with the highest labor standards and strongest labor movements are among the least likely to set a statutory minimum wage. This, the author argues, is due largely to trade union opposition. Trade unions oppose the minimum wage when they face minimal low-wage competition, which is affected by the political institutions regulating industrial action, collective agreements, and employment, as well as by the skill and wage levels of their members. When political institutions effectively regulate low-wage competition, unions oppose the minimum wage. When political institutions are less favorable toward unions, there may be a cleavage between high- and low-wage unions in their minimum wage preferences. The argument is illustrated with case studies of the UK, Germany, and Sweden. The author demonstrates how the regulation of low-wage competition affects unions’ minimum wage preferences by exploiting the following labor market institutional shocks: the Conservatives’ labor law reforms in the UK, the Hartz labor market reforms in Germany, and the European Court of Justice's Laval ruling in Sweden. The importance of union preferences for minimum wage adoption is also shown by how trade union confederation preferences influenced the position of the Labour Party in the UK and the Social Democratic Party in Germany.

This article studies the impact of design characteristics of in-work benefits on labour supply and poverty in an international comparative setting, taking account of both first-order (without taking labour supply effects into account) and second-order effects (taking labour supply effects into account). We use the microsimulation model EUROMOD, which has been enriched with a structural discrete choice labour supply model to take account of labour supply reactions. The analysis is performed for four EU member states: Belgium, Italy, Poland and Sweden. The results show that design characteristics matter substantially, though the specific effects differ in magnitude across countries, indicating there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Throughout the analysis, numerous trade-offs are uncovered: not only between work incentives and poverty goals, but also within work incentives themselves. Taking account of behavioural reactions attenuates the impact on poverty outcomes, signalling the importance of bringing these effects into the empirical analysis.

AbstractDrawing on Jacques Rancière’s theorising of the political, this article analyses the disagreement on undocumented migrants in recent legislation in Sweden and within the European Union as well as in Swedish labour union practice. Both the consensus understanding of the issue of undocumented migrants and the materialisation of dissensus through the political activities of undocumented migrants are studied. The aims of the article are: firstly, to show that undocumented migrants in Sweden engage in a political struggle that is not recognised as such, to analyse the structure or conditions of possibility of this non-recognition, and finally, to analyse the ways in which these conditions might be undone through the political activities of undocumented migrants. The theoretical claim is that the issue of undocumented migrants involves intimately core aspects of both politics and law and that the struggle of undocumented migrants is a process in which our understanding of political and legal subjectivity is called into question. In conclusion we reflect on the question of political change against the background of the theoretical and empirical findings of the analysis.

This paper focuses on the specific problems in the labour and social security legislation as it relates to crowdworkers in the digitalised new economy, analysing their place in labour market, and especially in the collective agreements which are the standard means of regulating working conditions in the Nordic model. Sweden has a binary system where a performing party is as either an employee or self-employed. The law on working and employment conditions offers only limited protection to those on short, fixed-term contracts; instead, it is social partners that have improved crowdworkers’ conditions in some industries by using collective bargaining. However, there are no collective agreements in the digital economy, or indeed for platform entrepreneurs. The complications of the parties’ positions will be analysed, especially as platforms do not consider themselves to be employers, but rather coordinators of the self-employed. It is not only labour law regulations that are important to prevent precariat among crowdworkers. It is also very important that the social security regulations adapt to the new labour market as the social security legislation is an important part of the Nordic model.

In the wake of the recent increase in the inflows of refugees to Europe, governments have made considerable investments in public policies aimed at facilitating the labour market integration of refugees. Despite these efforts, the labour market participation of refugees remains low. This situation raises the question of whether employers actually appreciate these public policies and whether refugees’ participation in specific active labour market policies (ALMPs), such as work practice or wage subsidies, increases their likelihood of being hired. In this article, we take a novel approach and combine employers’ evaluations of specific ALMPs with their attitudes towards refugees. We argue that these labour market policies can only be successful when employers hold positive attitudes towards refugees in the first place. We investigate this question by means of a factorial survey experiment with employers in Austria, Germany and Sweden. Our results show that, indeed, employers’ evaluations of fictional refugee candidates who participated in ALMPs are influenced by their attitudes towards this group. Participation in these policy measures is regarded positively only by those employers who already hold positive attitudes towards refugees.

Although the relationship between unemployment and poor mental well-being has long been an area of interest within behavioural science, the role of state intervention in the unemployment situation has not been thoroughly investigated. This article investigates how unemployment benefit systems and active labour market policy measures affect mental well-being among the unemployed in Sweden. The study uses a longitudinal and nationally representative survey of 3,500 unemployed Swedes. Three different types of active labour market policy measures involving the unemployed were studied, ‘activation’, ‘vocational training’ and ‘work-place participation’ measures. Of these only involvement in ‘workplace participation’ was found to have a clearly positive effect on mental well-being among those participating. Of the two Swedish unemployment benefit systems, the more generous income replacement Unemployment Benefits and the less generous flat rate Cash Unemployment Benefits, only access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was found to mediate the mental well-being impact of unemployment. The positive effect of access to income replacement Unemployment Benefits was further accentuated when unemployment was prolonged. Those with access to this benefit system seemed to suffer no further deterioration of mental well-being, while the mental well-being of the rest of the unemployed further deteriorated.

In a globalised world with an increasing division of labour, the competition for highly skilled individuals—regardless of their origin—is growing, as is the value of such individuals for national economies. Yet the majority of studies analysing the economic integration of immigrants shows that those who are highly skilled also have substantial hurdles to overcome: their employment rates and salaries are lower and they face a higher education-to-occupation mismatch compared to highly skilled natives. This paper contributes to the paucity of studies on the employment patterns of highly skilled immigrants to Sweden by providing an overview of the socio-demographic characteristics, labour-market participation and occupational mobility of highly educated migrants in Sweden. Based on a statistical analysis of register data, we compare their employment rates, salaries and occupational skill level and mobility to those of immigrants with lower education and with natives. The descriptive analysis of the data shows that, while highly skilled immigrants perform better than those with a lower educational level, they never catch up with their native counterparts. Our regression analyses confirm these patterns for highly skilled migrants. Furthermore, we find that reasons for migration matter for highly skilled migrants’ employment outcomes, with labour migrants having better employment rates, income and qualification-matched employment than family reunion migrants and refugees.

ABSTRACTIn Denmark, Norway and Sweden mothers of young children have a higher employment rate than have the mothers of other Western European countries. To make high quality childcare universally available is regarded as a national concern, and as part of the welfare state commitment. It is also often regarded as a precondition of mothers' employment. The modes of state intervention and the structure of child-care provision are basically the same in all three countries, yet this paper questions the commonly made assumption that Scandinavian reproduction policies are developed in accordance with one common model. The interrelationship between welfare state, market and family differs between the countries. While in Denmark and Sweden national policies supported the dual role of mothers in production and social reproduction, this was not the case in Norwegian policies in which the concept of the employed mother made only modest impact. Not surprisingly, Denmark and Sweden are more successful in approaching national aims for provision of childcare and also in facilitating mothers' labour market participation.

Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life. Using income and time use surveys from five countries (the USA, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden) that represent the principal types of welfare and gender regimes, we propose ways of operationalising the time that is strictly necessary for people to spend in paid labour, unpaid household labour, and personal care. The time people have at their disposal after taking into account what is strictly necessary in these three arenas – which we christen discretionary time – represents people's temporal autonomy. We measure the impact on this of government taxes, transfers, and childcare subsidies in these five countries. In so doing, we calibrate the contributions of the different welfare and gender regimes that exist in these countries, in ways that correspond to the lived reality of people's daily lives.

Abstract The opportunities available to start up a successful farm business structure the future of European farming. As fewer farm daughters and sons are projected to take over the family farm, there is increasing policy and academic interest in new entrants and the challenges they meet when they start their farm. This study focuses on new entrants that immigrate to Sweden. This group can be considered an extreme case of new entrants, as key resources (land, local networks, family labour support and farm specific knowledge are usually lacking for these farmers). Based on interviews with immigrant farmers in the Mälardalen region, we present the different ways they get access to economic, cultural and social capital. These insights are valuable for policy aimed at helping immigrant farmers starting up.

AbstractSweden is often considered a forerunner in family change and developments towards less gendered family production patterns. In this study, we focus on recent developments towards more gender-equal sharing of parental leave in Sweden. We explore how fathers’ use of parental leave has changed over time before and since the turn of the century. As the parental leave benefit is individual and earnings-based, we examine how fathers’ individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics are associated with their parental leave uptake over time, to determine whether there are forerunners and laggards in recent family change. Multinomial logistic regression models were applied to data from national registers. Our study demonstrates a bifurcation in trends in recent decades. This is associated with the extension of reforms that reserve part of the leave for fathers, the so-called “daddy months”, but stretches beyond the impact of any such reforms. Taking a long leave of over two months was pioneered by better-educated residents of metropolitan areas and surrounding suburbs, as well as Swedish-born fathers. Young fathers, low-income earners and foreign-born fathers lagged behind in these developments. We regard the unstable labour market situation of the latter as a contributing factor in widening social inequalities in family-related behaviour.

Abstract The European Union’s 2004 expansion was accompanied by worries in several western states about potential large-scale immigration by workers from new member states. In France, for example, the ‘Polish plumber’ featured as a symbol of cheap labour in the 2005 constitutional referendum. The accession treaty allowed existing member states to restrict the entry of workers from new member states for up to seven years; only the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden allowed immediate unrestricted entry of workers from new member states. Many workers, particularly Poles, did move, and a cursory examination of this migration could lead one to judge it a success. Ireland and Britain benefited from an influx of workers during a boom economic period and the Poles earned wages beyond what they would have earned at home. A closer examination illustrates the difficulties and discrimination faced by the Polish community in Ireland and Britain. This article documents how the skills of Polish migrants have been under-valued and how it was assumed that when the economy soured, they would leave. As many have stayed, they face further discrimination. The paper relies on both primary interviews and secondary sources to examine the treatment and future of Europe’s largest recent internal migration.

The article examines interpretations of freedom of movement and access to social assistance within the EU Directive 2004/38. Examples of EU migrants’ homelessness are shown to demonstrate the confusing circularity in the regulations. The paper goes on to the development of local governments’ and voluntary organizations’ practice of limiting support to EU migrants in homelessness. Narrower interpretations of the right to reside are a basis for refusing access to benefits or even shelter. Repressive public space practices lead sometimes even to deportations. These interpretations, practices and public discourse are shown on the examples of the Netherlands, the UK and Sweden. Interpretations of the European law, practices and public debate are tools that limit exercising the right to free movement by socially defining and categorising homeless EU migrants as persons whose rights are dependent on their position on the labour market.

Unemployment insurance systems are designed to provide income security for those who drop out of work temporarily. This form of social protection is particularly relevant for foreign-born workers who are, on average, more likely to become unemployed during layoffs. The article explores how the social protection of immigrants differs in cases where payments are tied to voluntary rather than mandatory contributions. This is done by focusing on a recent welfare reform in Sweden which led to both a sharp increase in costs and a decline in benefit generosity overnight. It is argued that migrants lost their social protection at a disproportionate rate over the course of the reform. Both their status on the labour market and position as newcomers to the norms and rules of society are expected to impede on their decision to obtain or prolong insurance membership, leading to a decline in eligibility to income security. Difference-in-difference estimates with administrative data from all unemployment insurance funds show that the share of benefit recipients with earnings-related payments decreased at a higher rate among the foreign-born as expected, especially if they had arrived in the country only recently.

Abstract The growing youth unemployment across Europe raises the need to take appropriate measures. One of steps taken towards decreasing it by the European Union has been the program Youth Guarantee, implemented by a number of member states. Despite the relatively lower youth unemployment, the Czech Republic has implemented this program as well, and supported the realization of the project Internships for Young Job Seekers, whose aim was to ease the transition for students from schools to the labour market thanks to internships in companies. The effects which internship related project bring for their participants have been evaluated in other EU countries, mainly in Germany, but also in Sweden or France. However, evidence about internships’ effectiveness has been missing for the Czech Republic, and this paper fills this existing knowledge gap with the use of counterfactual impact evaluation methods. In the paper, we have focused on examining the impacts of internships on personal income and economic status of trainees by using the propensity score matching, difference-in-differences estimation and two complementary methods – ordinary least squares and multinomial logit. The results confirmed a positive impact of internships on treated project participants regarding both outcome variables, and thus, are consistent with the majority of literature in the field.

AbstractDistributive justice is ordinarily calibrated in monetary terms. But money is not the only resource that matters to people. Talk of the ‘work−life balance’ points to another: time. Control over one's time, the capacity to spend it as one wishes, is another important resource; and its distribution raises another important aspect of justice. Here I describe a new method of distinguishing how much time one has discretionary control over, net of the amount it is necessary to spend in certain ways given one's circumstances. To draw out the distributive-justice implications of these calculations, I contrast the most-to-least privileged, in terms of discretionary time: a person in a dual-earner couple with no children, versus a lone mother. The magnitude of the gap between the discretionary time enjoyed by the best and worst is a measure of temporal injustice. That gap is substantially larger in some countries (such as the US and Australia) than in others (such as Finland and Sweden). Conventional welfare-state interventions – tax and transfer systems, support for child care – contribute pretty similarly to reducing that particular gap across all the countries examined. Differing practices surrounding the dissolution of marriages with children potentially makes a much bigger difference. Differing labour-market policies might make a similarly large difference yet again.

Though Denmark and Sweden have had a similar historical development over the years, the differences in their labor markets have become more visible than ever. While the labor shortage is increasing in Copenhagen, there is a high number of unemployed individuals with a more substantial proportion of vulnerable groups among them in Sweden. Despite some appealing factors (such as less governed labor law, the simplicity of employing and the high wages), the interest of Swedes to work in Copenhagen area has decreased, and as a result, the number of commuters has fallen. Could it then be employers’ attitudes towards foreign-born individuals that differ? Through interviewing Swedish and Danish employers and foreign-born population, Fördomsfönster Öresund project investigates if the attitudes differ and how social sustainability and utilizing the existent competence frame a common regional labor market. Interviews show that some concepts might be crucial in addressing the issue: language, prejudice, leadership and the difference in perceptions. By informing and responding to these problem areas, there is a strong possibility of greater integration, competence-based employment and higher revenues in commuting within the region. Keywords: Diversity, competence, social sustainability, labor market, green commuting

This article investigates the politics of reforming mature, pay-as-you-go pensions in the context of austerity. In both Sweden and Germany the Social Democratic party leadership advocated reform in response to similar financial and demographic pressures, but the Swedish reform was more successful in correcting perceived program weaknesses and in defending social democratic values. To explain this difference in outcomes, we focus on policy legacies and the organizational and political capacities of labor movements. We argue that existing pension policies in Germany were more constraining than in Sweden, narrowing the range of politically feasible strategies. By contrast, in Sweden, existing pension policy provided opportunities for turning vices into virtues and financing the transition to a new system. In addition, the narrow interests of German unions and the absence of institutionalized cooperation with the Social Democratic Party hindered reform. By contrast, the Swedish Social Democrats' bargaining position in pension reform negotiations with non-socialist parties was formulated with blue collar union interests in mind. The encompassing interests of Swedish unions and their close links with the Social Democrats facilitated a reform compromise.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the divergences in labor market-performances in four small, open economies: Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden. It argues that great unemployment in Belgium and the Netherlands is partly due to the implementation of deflationary policies during the 1980s. The decline of Keynesian intervention in Belgium and the Netherlands is traced to the institutional independence of their central banks to set monetary and exchange rate policies separate from government. Because the Swedish and Austrian central banks are more integrated in the policy process and their countries are not members of the Common Market or the European Monetary System, social democratic governments have been able to go against the European trend of monetary restrictiveness and fiscal austerity. Accordingly, business in Austria and Sweden is more optimistic about future profit returns and is more willing to invest in productive capital, resulting in lower unemployment.

The purpose of the research is to analyze the state of gender equality in the labor sphere. The research methods are as follows: system and logical analysis, comparative analysis, generalization and systematization and a number of others. An analysis of current issues in the labor market in the gender dimension has been conducted. In gender relations, a very important problem has not been resolved yet: a significant difference in the average wage of men and women. The Women in Work Index has shown that Iceland and Sweden remain in the top two in terms of the gender gap in OECD member countries, while Slovenia ranks the third place. The Women Business and the Law Index for 2000-2019 among 190 countries in the world, covering eight indicators related to women’s economic participation, has been analyzed. The employment rate of women and men in recent decades has shown that the share of women in labor markets is increasing worldwide.

Three decades ago, John Langbein published an influential book on medieval and early modern judicial torture. Before Langbein, Enlightenment philosophers such as Beccaria and Voltaire had traditionally been credited with the final abolition of judicial torture in the leading European states during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Langbein dismissed the traditional explanation as a “fairy tale,” claiming that the use of torture had in fact declined in major European countries since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before its formal abolition. In the medieval statutory or Roman-canon theory of proof, judicial torture was originally designed to produce confessions in cases of serious crime in which “full proof” in the form of confession or two eyewitnesses was needed to convict. The argument that Langbein advanced is that the emerging new modes of punishment for serious crime, such as forced labor, transportation, and imprisonment, enabled European criminal courts to take full advantage of the medieval legal institution of extraordinary punishment, poena extraordinaria, which could be imposed without confession if the evidence was otherwise convincing. Extraordinary punishment was by definition something else than the ordinary punishment, usually less than capital punishment. In practice this meant milder punishment on less evidence. Langbein's pivotal point is that the rise of the extraordinary punishment rendered torture unnecessary in many cases, although it still remained legal. Causing a revolution in the law of proof, free judicial evaluation of evidence thus in fact developed alongside the old statutory theory of proof, which now lost its monopoly.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of “Korta Vägen” (The short cut), a targeted language program for qualified migrants in Sweden, in self-maintaining, well-being and perspectives for socio-economic integration for foreigners with academic diploma. Design/methodology/approach In-class observations, individual semi-structured interviews, focus-group interviews and written essays were used for data collection. A thematic analysis was applied as a method of data analysis. Amartya Sen’s capability approach constituted a theoretical framework of the research discussion. Findings Korta Vägen provides various resources for the participants, some of which (language training and internship) can become real advantages for employment. Others (IT, interview training and CV writing) are less translatable into concrete outcomes. The study suggests that satisfaction with the program is modulated by commitment to one’s professional identity, initial language proficiency, scope of cultural knowledge, the participants’ goals and the flexibility of the training offered. The acculturation frame of the program does not necessarily correspond with the objective need of many participants for quick entry into the labor market. Originality/value Insights into the social-psychological aspects of targeted language training as a measure for socio-economic integration can serve to enhance educational and institutional policies and professional practice.

ABSTRACTThough each of the capitalist democracies has developed a similar battery of programs for mitigating labor market problems, politically significant differences in strategy underlie superficial similarities. By the 1970s, labor market strategies could be distinguished by three models: a passive social democratic or guardian strategy (Britain), an active social democratic or egalitarian strategy (Sweden), and a passive neo-liberal or business-centered strategy (United States). In response to high unemployment, the Thatcher government has resurrected a long dormant fourth strategy that combines neo-liberal principles with an active state. This active neo-liberal or market-centered approach seeks a workforce that is less organised, has greater wage disparities, and is more adaptable to business needs. The government's activism is evident in the growth of the Manpower Services Commission, both in absolute terms and relative to passive compensatory measures. Its neo-liberalism is evident in reducing structural impediments to lower wages, increasing incentives for individual initiative, and revamping employment and training schemes along neo-liberal lines. These efforts correlate with decreasing levels of union membership, increasing self-employment, and increasing wage disparities in the British economy, trends that are, by the government's criteria, improvements.

AbstractPrevious studies have shown mixed results concerning the effects of participation in active labour market policy programmes (ALMPs) on the longer-term scars in the form of poor income development and low job stability following the end of an unemployment spell. Most previous studies, however, have been limited both in the time frame used and to particular programmes. We argue that human capital investments are long-term investments and should therefore also be investigated from a long-term perspective. ALMP training and ALMPs as subsidised employment also represent different types of human capital investments that may produce effects that are differently distributed over time. In order to handle these issues, this article uses a longitudinal register-based dataset in which all long-term (more than six months) unemployed Swedes in 1993, who had no labour market problems in 1992, were followed for ten years. We found positive effects of ALMP participation concerning both the probability of reaching pre-unemployment incomes and a reduction in the hazard of exiting the labour market, while the effect on the probability of having an unemployment-free year was mixed. The effects of the two forms of ALMPs were differently distributed over time, with ALMP employment having an immediate effect that decreased relatively quickly and ALMP training having a longer-term effect.

The article presents the international positive experience of the probation service for juvenile convicts in the post-prison period, orienting the convict in the process of social adaptation to independent development. An individual who cares about his family and close relatives, benefits the state and society through labor, is a law-abiding citizen who meets all the requirements and generally accepted principles of a legal, modern society and sovereign state. The author of the article formulates the main conclusions, which determine that the main goal of “probation services” is to promote the successful social adaptation of persons of juvenile convicts released from prison. First of all, this assistance consists in rendering assistance to a juvenile convicted person in restoring socially useful ties, social welfare, employment, providing psychosocial, qualified legal and medical assistance, as well as preventing their recidivism. The good practice of the Probation Service of such sovereign states of the World as the Republic of Kazakhstan, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan is presented.

With the convergence of national markets of individual countries and the revival of globalization processes, international competition is growing not only among producers of goods and services, but also among regions and countries. There are a significant number of approaches to the analysis and improvement of countries’ competitiveness. Given Ukraine’s European integration pass, we consider the EU countries to be a key benchmark for its development. The EU, as a union of democratic European countries working together for peace and prosperity, must support a high competitiveness for both the Union as a whole and its member states in the face of increasing global competition. European integration has a significant positive impact on the development and competitiveness of the EU. However, in recent decades, it has deteriorated somewhat compared to global leaders due to dynamic changes in the international environment. As shown, EU countries (primarily the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland) occupy high positions in international rankings (Global Competitiveness Indexes of the WEF and IMD, Legatum Prosperity Index, ERT Benchmarking Report, Business Europe Reform Barometer), and especially sustainable development (SDSN Sustainable Development Index) etc. However, in a number of key areas, many EU countries and the Union generally lag behind world leaders. Today’s open and export-oriented European economy suffers from weak demand for investment and consumer goods, slow development of innovative and digital businesses etc. Instead, the EU is a global leader in achieving the goals of sustainable development. Experts primarily recommend strengthening the EU’s single market and supporting new technologies, while all European countries should increase productivity, which requires greater investment in critical infrastructure, innovative technologies, skills development and labor market efficiency. Оn the other hand, European companies should constantly take into account the global situation and dynamics and modernize their competition policy accordingly. Ukraine’s adoption of the best European experience of raising the competitiveness, taking into account the obtained conclusions, may be the subject of further research.

It is hard to determine when adverse labour conditions become exploitation. As of July 1, 2018, ‘human exploitation’ is criminalised in Sweden, with penalties up to ten years prison. The crime of ‘human exploitation’ occurs when someone, through unlawful coercion, misleads, exploits another person’s position of dependence, lack of protection, or difficult situation, or exploits another person in forced labour, work under obviously unreasonable conditions or begging. This article describes how disputes concerning low wages are to be handled within the Swedish model for labour market regulation, and contrasts this with the novel crime that adds a criminal law element to this otherwise civil law-oriented model.

AbstractDrawing on survey data on individuals’ motives for migration in Sweden (N = 2172), we examine the importance of family and friends for return versus onward migration, including their importance for different age groups and in different communities on the rural–urban spectrum. The results point to a significant relationship between the importance of family and return versus onward migration, with family importance decreasing with age among returning migrants. At the same time, the importance of friends for returning increases with age. The findings did not suggest a significant relationship between urbanicity and returning versus migration elsewhere. Based on a subset of respondents who were employed prior to migrating (n = 1056), we further examined labor market outcomes for onward versus returning migrants. The results broadly indicate that return migrations are linked to lower likelihoods of labor market deterioration and improvement, suggesting greater labor market stability for return vis-à-vis onward migrations. However, the importance of family for returning (versus moving elsewhere) is associated with higher likelihoods of labor market deterioration and improvement compared with staying the same, indicating greater volatility in labor market outcomes when the importance of family is considered.

<p>In my paper I would like to discuss the specifics of community interpreting (CI) as a relatively new art of interpreting. The following aspects should be taken into consideration: the definition of the term on specific scopes of CI and compared to other types of interpretation as well as a brief overview of the development of this type of interpreting in Sweden, USA and Canada as pioneer countries and German-speaking countries.</p><p>For the definition of CI compared especially to conference interpreting, the following factors are important: the particular communication situation, the additional skills of the interpreter, guidelines for CI as well as questions of quality management and the role of the interpreter: Is the tendency to over-emphasize the position of power of the community interpreter fair? </p><p>In the context of a country-specific overview, the following are also discussed: the professional status of the community interpreter and the situation on the labor market – in areas of court interpreting (including asylum procedures, eg Legal Law Clinic in Innsbruck, Austria as a positive example) and hospital interpreting – and training for community interpreters at university (eg in Graz and Vienna in Austria).</p><p>In conclusion, I would like to speak about necessary steps to professionalize CI in German-speaking countries.</p>

Industrial activities commonly discharge a broad range of synthetic compounds directly intowater recipients without previous treatment. Despite the existence of available technologiesfor industrial wastewater treatment, better understanding of treatment processes is stillrequired, since these waters are relatively complex and usually contain either persistent orrecalcitrant compounds. Treatment systems with low costs of implementation, operation andmaintenance as well as energy and labor saving processes ought to be developed. Biologicaltreatment systems are potentially good options to meet these requirements. In this study, apreliminary investigation in lab scale was carried out with a Sequencing Batch Reactor -SBRused to treat a non-conventional industrial wastewater generated by a wood-floor industry,located in Nybro, Sweden. The study focused on: (i) formalin reduction in aqueous phase and;(ii) COD reduction. The proposed SBR reached a high efficiency in reducing formalin withinthe aqueous phase (from 53% to 98%) suggesting the use of formalin by the microorganismsas a primary carbon source. On the other hand, COD reduction (-34% to 73%) was notsatisfactory, which is probably related with the presence of polymeric compounds with highmolecular weight in the urea-formaldehyde resin, Recommendations for the systemimprovement are: (i) effluent recirculation; (ii) longer filling periods during each batch and;(iii) both primary and secondary settling/ sedimentation. As a result of very high initial CODcontents (ranging between 736-5608 mg L·\ even though a high percentage of reduction isachieved, the final effluent would still not meet the threshold limits for effluent discharges inwater bodies. Additional treatment options could be advanced oxidative processes such asozonation and Fenton.

Introduction Curation-related discourses have become widespread. The growing public profile of curators, the emergence of new curation-related discourses and their proliferation beyond the confines of museums, particularly on social media, have led some to conclude that we now live in an age of curation (Buskirk cited in Synder). Curation is commonly understood in instrumentalist terms as the evaluation, selection and presentation of artefacts around a central theme or motif (see O’Neill; Synder). However, there is a growing academic interest in what underlies the shifting discourses and practices. Many are asking what do these changes mean (Martinon) now that “the curatorial turn” has positioned curation as a legitimate object of academic study (O’Neill). This article locates an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism studies since 2010 within the shifting meanings of curation from antiquity to the digital age. It argues that the industry is facing a Foucauldian moment where the changing political economy of news and the proliferation of user-generated content on social media have disrupted the monopolies traditional news media held over the circulation of knowledge of current affairs and the power this gave them to shape public debate. The disruptions are profound, prompting a rethinking of journalism (Peters and Broersma; Schudson). However, debates have polarised between those who view news curation as symptomatic of the demise of journalism and others who see it as part of a wider revival of the profession, freed from monopolistic institutions to circulate a wider array of knowledge and viewpoints (see Picard). This article eschews such polarisations and instead draws on Robert Picard’s argument that journalism is in transition and that journalism, as a set of professional practices, is adapting to the age of curation but that those traditional news providers that fail to adapt will most likely decline. However, Picard’s approach does not address the definitional problem as to what distinguishes news curating from other journalistic practices when the commonly used instrumental definition can apply to editing. This article aims to negotiate this problem by addressing some of the conceptual ambiguities that arise from wholly instrumental notions of news curation. From “Cura” to the Curatorial Turn and the Age of Curation Modern instrumentalist definitions are necessary but not sufficient for an exploration of the curatorial turn in journalism. Tracing the meanings of curation over time facilitates an expansion of the instrumental to include metaphoric conceptualisations. The term originated in a Latin allegory about a mythological figure, personified as the “cura”, translated literally as care or concern, and who created human beings from the clay of the earth. Having created the human, the cura was charged by the gods with the lifelong care of the human (Reich) and at the same time became a symbol of curiosity and creativity (see Nowotny). “Curators” first emerged in Imperial Rome to denote a public officer charged with maintaining order and the emperor’s finances (Nowotny) but by the fourteenth century the meaning had shifted to that of religious officer charged with the care of souls (Gaskill). At this point the metaphorical associations of creativity and curiosity subsided. Six hundred years later souls had been replaced by artefacts valorised because of their contribution to human knowledge or as a testament to exceptional human creativity (Nowotny). Objects of curiosity and originality, as well as their creators, were reified and curation became the specialist practice of an expert custodian charged with the care and preservation of artefacts but relegated to the background to collect, evaluate and archive artefacts entrusted to the care of museums and to be preserved for future generations. Instrumentalist meanings thus dominated. From the 1960s discourses shifted again from the privileging of a “producer who actually creates the object in its materiality” to an entire set of actors (Bourdieu 261). These shifts were part of the changing political economy of museums, the growing prevalence of exhibitions and the emergence of mega-exhibitions hosted in global cities and capable of attracting massive audiences (see O’Neill). The curator was no longer seen merely as a custodian but able to add cultural value to artefacts when drawing individual items together into a collection, interpreting their relevance to a theme then re-presenting them through a story or visuals (see O’Neill). The verb “to curate”, which had first entered the English lexicon in the early 1900s but was used sporadically (Synder), proliferated from the 1960s in museum studies (Farquharson cited in O’Neill) as mega-exhibitions attracted publicity and the higher profile of curators attracted the attention of intellectuals prompting a curatorial turn in museum studies. The curatorial turn in museum studies from the 1980s marks the emergence of curation as a legitimate object of academic enquiry. O’Neill identified a “Foucauldian moment” in museum studies where shifting discourses signified challenges to, and disruptions of, traditional forms of knowledge-based power. Curation was no longer seen as a neutral activity of preservation, but one located within a contested political economy and invested with contradictions and complexities. Philosophers such as Martinon and Nowotny have highlighted the impossibility of separating the oversight of valuable artefacts from the processes by which these are selected, valorised and signified and what, at times, has been the controversial appropriation of creative outputs. Thus, a new critical approach emerged. Recently, curating-related discourses have expanded beyond the “rarefied” world of museum studies (Synder). Social media platforms have facilitated the proliferation of user-generated content offering a vast array of new artefacts. Information circulates widely and new discourses can challenge traditional bases of knowledge. Audiences now actively search for new material driven in part by curiosity and a growing distrust of the professions and establishments (see Holmberg). The boundaries between professionals and lay people are blurring and, some argue, knowledge is being democratized (see Ibrahim; Holmberg). However, as new information becomes voluminous, alternative truths, misinformation and false information compete for attention and there is a growing demand for the verification, selection and presentation of artefacts, that is online curation (Picard; Bakker). Thus, the appropriation of social media is disrupting traditional power relations but also offering new opportunities for new information-related practices. Journalism is facing its own Foucauldian moment. A Foucauldian Moment in Journalism Studies Journalism has been traditionally understood as capturing today’s happenings, verifying the facts of an event, then presenting these as a narrative that reporters update as news unfolds. News has been seen as the preserve of professionals trained to interview eyewitnesses or experts, to verify facts and to compile what they found into a compelling narrative (Hallin and Mancini). News-gathering was typically the work of an individual tasked with collecting stand-alone stories then passing them onto editors to evaluate, select, prioritise and collate these into a collection that formed a newspaper or news programme . This understanding of journalism emerged from the 1830s along with a type of news that was accessible, that large numbers of people wanted to read and that, consequently, attracted advertising making news profitable (Park). The idea that presumed trained journalists were best placed to produce news appeared first in the UK and USA then spread worldwide (Hallin and Mancini). At the same time as there was growing demand for news, space constraints restricted how much could be published and the high costs of production served as a barrier to entry first in print then later in broadcast media (Picard; Curran and Seaton). The large news organisations that employed these professionals were thus able to control the circulation of information and knowledge they generated and the editors that selected content were able, in part, to shape public debates (Picard; Habermas). Social media challenge the control traditional media have had over the production and dissemination of news since the mid-1800s. Practically every major global news story in 2010 and 2011 from natural disasters to uprisings was broken by ordinary people on social media (Bruns and Highfield). Twitter facilitates a steady stream of updates at an almost real-time speed that 24-hour news channels cannot match. Facebook, Instagram and blogs add commentary, context, visuals and personal stories to breaking news. Experts and official sources routinely post announcements on social media platforms enabling anyone to access much of the same source material that previously was the preserve of reporters. Investigations by bloggers have exposed abuses of power by companies and governments that journalists on traditional media have failed to (Wischnowski). Audiences and advertisers are migrating away from traditional newspapers to a range of different online platforms. News consumers now actively use search engines to find available information of interest and look for efficient ways of sifting through the proliferation of the useful and the dubious, the revelatory and the misleading or inaccurate (see Picard). That is, news organisations and the professional journalists they employ are increasingly operating in a hyper-competitive (see Picard) and hyper-sceptical environment. This paper posits that cumulatively these are disrupting the control news organisations have and journalism is facing a Foucauldian moment when shifting discourses signify a disturbance of the intellectual rules that shape who and what knowledge of news is produced and hence the power relations they sustain. Social media not only challenge the core news business of reporting, they also present new opportunities. Some traditional organisations have responded by adding new activities to their repertoire of practices. In 2011, the Guardian uploaded its entire database of the expense claims of British MPs onto its Website and invited readers to select, evaluate and comment on entries, a form of crowd-sourced curating. Andy Carvin, while at National Public Radio (NPR) built an international reputation from his curation of breaking news, opinion and commentary on Twitter as Syria became too dangerous for foreign correspondents to enter. New types of press agencies such as Storyful have emerged around a curatorial business model that aggregates information culled from social media and uses journalists to evaluate and repackage them as news stories that are sold onto traditional news media around the world (Guerrini). Research into the growing market for such skills in the Netherlands found more advertisements for “news curators” than for “traditional reporters” (Bakker). At the same time, organic and spontaneous curation can emerge out of Twitter and Facebook communities that is capable of challenging news reporting by traditional media (Lewis and Westlund). Curation has become a common refrain attracting the attention of academics. A Curatorial Turn in Journalism The curatorial turn in journalism studies is manifest in the growing academic attention to curation-related discourses and practices. A review of four academic journals in the field, Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, and Digital Journalism found the first mention of journalism and curation emerged in 2010 with references in nearly 40 articles by July 2015. The meta-analysis that follows draws on this corpus. The consensus is that traditional business models based on mass circulation and advertising are failing partly because of the proliferation of alternative sources of information and the migration of readers in search of it. While some of this alternative content is credible, much is dubious and the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to discern what to believe. It is unsurprising, then, that there is a growing demand for “new types and practices of curation and information vetting” that attest to “the veracity and accuracy of content” particularly of news (Picard 280). However, academics disagree on whether new information practices such as curation are replacing or supplementing traditional newsgathering. Some look for evidence of displacement in the expansion of job advertisements for news curators relative to those for traditional reporters (Bakker). Others look at how new and traditional practices co-exist in organisations like the BBC, Guardian and NPR, sometimes clashing and sometimes collaborating in the co-creation of content (McQuail cited in Fahy and Nisbet; Hermida and Thurman). The debate has polarised between whether these changes signify the “twilight years of journalism or a new dawn” (Picard). Optimists view the proliferation of alternative sources of information as breaking the control traditional organisations held over news production, exposing their ideological biases and disrupting their traditional knowledge-based power and practices (see Hermida; Siapera, Papadopoulou, and Archontakis; Compton and Benedetti). Others have focused on the loss of “traditional” permanent journalistic jobs (see Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello; Spaulding) with the implication that traditional forms of professional practice are in demise. Picard rejects this polarisation, counter-arguing that much analysis implicitly conflates journalism as a practice with the news organisations that have traditionally hosted it. Journalists may or may not be located within a traditional media organisation and social media is offering numerous opportunities for them to operate independently and for new types of hybrid practices and organisations such as Storyful to emerge outside of traditional operations. Picard argues that making the most of the opportunities social media presents is revitalising the profession offering a new dawn but that those traditional organisations that fail to adapt to the new media landscape and new practices are in their twilight years and likely to decline. These divergences, he argues, highlight a profession and industry in transition from an old order to a new one (Picard). This notion of journalism in transition usefully negotiates confusion over what curation in the social media age means for news providers but it does not address the uncertainty as to where it sits in relation to journalism. Futuristic accounts predict that journalists will become “managers of content rather than simply sourcing one story next to another” and that roles will shift from reporting to curation (Montgomery cited in Bakker; see Fahy and Nisbet). Others insist curators are not journalists but “information workers” or “gatecheckers” (McQuail 2013 cited in Bakker; Schwalbe, Silcock, and Candello) thereby differentiating the professional from the manual worker and reinforcing the historic elitism of the professions by implying curation is a lesser practice. However, such demarcation is problematic in that arguably both journalist and news curator can be seen as information workers and the instrumental definition outlined at the beginning of this article is as relevant to curation as it is to news editing. It is therefore necessary to revisit commonly used definitions (see Bakker; Guerrini; Synder). The literature broadly defines content creation, including news reporting, as the generation of original content that is distinguishable from aggregation and curation, both of which entail working with existing material. News aggregation is the automated use of computer algorithms to find and collect existing content relevant to a specified subject followed by the generation of a list or image gallery (Bakker; Synder). While aggregators may help with the collection component of news curation, the practices differ in their relation to technology. Apart from the upfront human design of the original algorithm, aggregation is wholly machine-driven while modern news curation adds human intervention to the technological processes of aggregation (Bakker). This intervention is conscious rather than automated, active rather than passive. It brings to bear human knowledge, expertise and interpretation to verify and evaluate content, filter and select artefacts based on their perceived quality and relevance for a particular topic or theme then re-present them in an accessible form as a narrative or infographics or both. While it does not involve the generation of original news content in the way news reporting does, curation is more than the collation of information. It can also involve the re-presenting of it in imaginative ways, the re-formulating of existing content in new configurations. In this sense, curation can constitute a form of creativity increasingly common in the social media age, that of re-mixing and re-imagining of existing material to create something novel (Navas and Gallagher). The distinction, therefore, between content creation and content curation lies primarily in the relation to original material and not the assumed presence or otherwise of creativity. In addition, curation outputs need not stand apart from news reports. They can serve to contextualize news in ways that short reports cannot while the latter provides original content to sit alongside curated materials. Thus the two types of news-related practices can complement rather than compete with each other. While this addresses the relation between reporting and curation, it does not clarify the relation between curating and editing. Bakker eludes to this when he argues curating also involves “editing … enriching or combining content from different sources” (599). But teasing out the distinctions is tricky because editing encompasses a wide range of sub-specialisations and divergent duties. Broadly speaking, editors are “newsrooms professionals … with decision-making authority over content and structure” who evaluate, verify and select information so are “quality controllers” in newsrooms (Stepp). This conceptualization overlaps with the instrumentalist definition of curation and while the broad type of skills and tasks involved are similar, the two are not synonymous. Editors tends to be relatively experienced professionals who have worked up the newsroom ranks whereas news curators are often new entrants ultimately answerable to editors. Furthermore, curation in the social media age involves voluminous material that curators sift through as part of first level content collection and it involves ever more complex verification processes as digital technologies make it increasingly easy to alter and falsify information and images. The quality control role of curators may also involve in-house specialists or junior staff working with external experts in a particular region or specialisation (Fahy and Nisbett). Some of job advertisements suggest a growing demand for specialist curatorial skills and position these alongside other newsroom professionals (Bakker). Whether this means they are journalists is still open to question. Conclusion This article has presented a more expansive conceptualisation of news curation than is commonly used in journalism studies, by including both the instrumental and the symbolic dimensions of a proliferating practice. It also sought to avoid confining this wider conceptualisation within unhelpful polarisations as to whether news curation is symbolic of a wider demise or revival of journalism by distinguishing the profession from the organisation in which it operates. The article was then free to negotiate the conceptual ambiguity surrounding the often taken-for-granted instrumental meanings of curation. It argues that what distinguishes news curation from traditional newsgathering is the relationship to original content. While the reporter generates the journalistic equivalent of original content in the form of news, the imaginative curator re-mixes and re-presents existing content in potentially novel ways. This has faint echoes of the mythological cura creating something new from the existing clay. The other conceptual ambiguity negotiated was in the definitional overlaps between curating and editing. On the one hand, this questions the appropriateness of reducing the news curator to the status of an “information worker”, a manual labourer rather than a professional. On the other hand, it positions news curators as one of many types of newsroom professionals. 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