[mrmekon]

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing business here.

Granting unpaid leave to go try your own thing for a while is, from the employer's perspective, not any different. Some people never come back, most people do. The same is true for parental leave (many quit their jobs towards the end of their leave, if they had already been thinking about it).

Even when they aren't required to grant it, larger Swedish companies will often give you unpaid leave if you just ask. The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill.

Sweden has an enormous market of consultancies compared to the U.S. for filling these temporary gaps. Obviously consultants are expensive and not trained on your projects, so it's not the same as a long-time employee, but it gives options to "control the bleeding."

[maxsilver]

> The fear is that otherwise you will quit. Hiring is hard here, so it's better to have a promise of someone coming back in 6 months than a job opening that can take 12 months to fill.

This is what a strong economy actually looks like.

It's hard (in my experience) to get Americans to understand this, because our economy here has been so bad for so long, most people here have never experienced anything like this.

[lkrubner]

Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power. In a strong economy, the percentage of national income going to workers would increase, as it did from 1935 to 1973.

[CalRobert]

Additionally, in 1973, there was a good chance you had a partner who could stay at home to watch the kid(s). Now you have both people working whether you like it or not, because you're competing with two-income households for housing.

Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing, but making it (on average) necessary for two people to work to afford a home when before it took one is a bad thing.

[Jerry2]

>Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing

Alternative is 'trapping them' (horrible choice of words btw) into corporate servitude. Which of the two is better? Which of the two is better for children?

[ep103]

Which of the two is better?

trapping in corporate. Trapping in corporate grants economic independence.

Which means, depending on the family situation, it may be better for the children... it means the woman has the ability to run away if she needs to.

Not saying its a perfect system, or that it should be a binary choice (it shouldn't be), but of the binary choice, one is blatantly better.

[reb]

"Domestic servitude" is a poor way to present homemaking, but calling its historical pull a trap for women isn't far off. Obviously anyone who's struggled in the business world understands joining the game is only liberating along a couple of dimensions (economic, mainly).

The choice should be there for men and women to work or rear. Applying that freedom appropriately is the individual's responsibility.

[dragonwriter]

> "Domestic servitude" is a poor way to present homemaking

It is when you are absolutely economically dependent on the outside of the home work, from which you are functionally excluded, of a partner for survival, when even searching for an alternative in the same line is grounds for termination without support, and where the one on whom you are dependent has a legal right to use you sexually without consent (criminalization of marital rape in the US began in the mid-1970s after the mass entry of women into the workforce)? I think “domestic servitude” is an overly positive euphemistic description of the condition women were generally trapped in before their out-of-the-home work became normalized.

[antisthenes]

> Of course, not trapping women in domestic servitude is a good thing

Any reason you used the term servitude which implies a negative connotation, when many women were happy with that arrangement? It also implies none of the women received positive utility from staying at home with the kids and it was always a chore, which seems a little ridiculous.

We should be embracing every opportunity for more personal involvement with our children and family, not calling it servitude. It does all families, past, present and future, a huge disservice.

[jfengel]

If it's something either parent does because it's what they want, then it is indeed not servitude.

But in 1973, it fell almost exclusively to the female parent, whether it was what she wanted or not. Many women may well have been happy with that arrangement, but practically no men would have "received positive utility". And either there's something unique about the Y chromosome that makes it impossible for them to enjoy that, or a lot of women weren't so much "happy" as "accepting".

We should indeed embrace opportunities for more personal involvement in families -- for both parents. Generous leave is a big start on that. But "100% leave, as long as you're female" is not.

[rcxdude]

the term presumably is used because at that point it was not a choice. Many women may have been happy with it, but there was scant alternative for those who were not.

[CalRobert]

It depends on a lot on where you were, but there are places that literally fired women when they got married. https://www.irishcentral.com/news/how-things-have-changed-te...

This has changed, but it reveals a lot. It also might relate to why it's so hard to find teachers for the price government is accustomed to paying - if you were a well-educated woman in the 1950's you had far fewer options (aka bargaining power) than you do today, and teaching was likely to be one of the few options with a bit of prestige and mental stimulation available to you.

It's true that women weren't FORCED to not work, but to suggest that they didn't face a strong disadvantage is disingenuous. Hell, it's still a rampant problem - how many tech bros get off an interview and then say "ah but she's 32, she'll want to take maternity soon". This is a good reason for making maternity and paternity leave equal, incidentally...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/podcasts/the-daily/pregna...

Though for all that, my wife stays home with our kid by choice. She went back to work when our daughter was 6 months old, and after six months of barely seeing her outside of the weekends she just couldn't bear it (I didn't much like it either). The only reason we can do that is because I have a good paying job in tech making something over the 90th percentile of incomes in my country. I wish other people had that choice. Hell, I wish I had that choice. But few do.

[parski]

I think we would all be happy to be financially independant with our families but reality is different. Every society is severely broken by patriarchal norms which is hurting everyone. Most of all women. Enabling domestic servitude (which is both negative and the appropriate term) by catering to utopian fantasies only is only enforcing these norms and directly crippling women.

[merpnderp]

I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?

[rory096]

The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...

[jhoechtl]

This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?

[lkrubner]

See this graph:

http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree...

A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-...

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...

[onlyrealcuzzo]

This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist. Overall, it's still been a VERY strong economy since '73. The US has been either first or second in GDP growth EVERY YEAR FOR 40 years! China has been killing it recently, but over the given time period, the US is still by far the best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_growt...

A real weak economy would look like Japan, Ukraine, Russia, Zimbabwe, etc.

Life for the laborer has been under systemic attack since Reagan, but the US economy as a whole has been doing swimmingly.

[rchaud]

> This is a weak economy if you're a laborer and not a capitalist.

Replace capitalist with monopolist and I'd agree.

How many capitalists make losses for 20 years and not only stay in their job, but actually become the world's richest person? Where would Uber be if they couldn't use VC money to undercut taxi companies, and subsidize hundreds of millions in losses. And let's not even get started on the issue of offshore tax avoidance, something your local hardware store will never have access to.

[mbrodersen]

GDP is a very bad target to aim for.

[refurb]

Total compensation has almost doubled since 1970, adjusting for inflation.

Looking at wages alone is only half the picture.

[lkrubner]

You are thinking of average compensation. Most reasonable people avoid talking about average compensation, since income has concentrated into the hands of the top workers. The top 1% of Hollywood actors, sports athletes and Wall Street hedge fund traders make several million dollars a year, and therefore they grossly distort the average. Their income hides the reality. If we focus on median income, of all forms, total real compensation for men has declined since 1973.

[Mirioron]

>This is what a strong economy actually looks like.

Is it actually though? Couldn't it also be a sign of an aging population? Sweden's population is growing, but it's mostly due to immigration. Considering the type of immigration that's mostly happening it's not bringing in lots of skilled workers.

[netjiro]

Partially anecdotal:

The problem with hiring is from what I've seen not due to ageing population. Instead, due to very protective employment regulation employers in Sweden are absurdly slow and picky when hiring. Resulting in a very large temp staffing sector. They are also surprisingly conservative in expectations.

Contrasting anecdotal rant:

In 2014-2018 I was trying to help a Swedish company get a tech dev project going. They needed to bring in about five experts. For years this project was delayed until it was no longer relevant, because they had a pointlessly limited view on who they needed to hire, at what cost and under which structure. They would not accept a 15% salary increase above their opinion of the norm, and neither a distributed project nor a collaborative partner network construct. This loss of opportunity was huge for them.

During the same time I was staffing, running, and completing two projects in Switzerland, total of 25ppl. No issues, quick handling, excellent outcome. The Swiss investors understood that it's ok to run a project distributed across five countries and pay an extra 20-50% if it's difficult to find good people locally in a given field. Skill and speed is more important than location, cost, surname, language[2], etc.

This is not the only such situation I've come across in Sweden. I work as an R&D consultant specialised in setting up and running distributed collaborative high risk tech projects. Despite being a native Swede it's easier for me to run projects in Switzerland than in Sweden. Kind of sad.

For your second point:

For skilled immigrants (stem university degree) the situation is quite good.

From what I've heard, 2nd-3rd generation immigrants and onward tend to outperform the "native" population. This may change in Sweden after the large influx of unskilled refugees in the last 20-30 years, vs the predominantly work based immigration of 1950-1980s.

Statistically [1]: Sweden has one of the highest gaps in unemployment between European and non-European unskilled immigrants. If you're uneducated you _really_ should migrate to somewhere else if you _ever_ want to get a job.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/graph/png/Immigrat...

2: as long as they know English well enough :)

[CalRobert]

It's like you need to grab Plato for a search and rescue mission to the cave.

[2019ideas]

>This is what a strong economy actually looks like.

No mention of wages and jobs.

In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me.

Vacation policy? Unpaid, but at 60$/hr, I just afford to take 3 weeks of vacation, but 2 weeks of holidays too.

[vonmoltke]

> In Electrical Engineering(US), its vicious the amount of competition trying to get me.

When did that start? I left EE in about 2006 because I felt like all the employers were very demanding of specific skillsets and treated engineers like they were easily replaceable.

[mikeash]

Congratulations on being in a high-demand field. It’s pretty great. But it’s definitely not the experience for most American workers.

[hpkuarg]

Is the Swedish case the same even for non-high demand fields? I suppose by definition every job (irrespective of compensation or skill needed) would be a high demand field if it takes 12 months to fill; at which point I suggest that what Sweden has is a demographics problem, not a strong economy.

[deogeo]

It's not a demographics problem from the point of view of the workers.

[CorvusCrypto]

I think it depends on the company too. For tech companies especially in Stockholm and Malmö, It's really easy to hire developers. If it's a startup good luck getting unpaid leave during huge rushes as well as during industrisemester. So of course as always it depends.

However the thing I think that is more unique to Sweden and drives these kind of nice benefits is that it's really hard to get rid of an employee. Employees are protected so much with rules and regulations that even if you get let go you have a required three month grace period unless otherwise negotiated with the employee.

It's not uncommon I would say to see tech workers "fired" but then still on the payroll for an extra 2 months while they are arbetsbefriad (paid leave)

Pretty nice if you know how to game the system

[zmodem]

I think the proper English word for this role is contractor rather than consultant.

[jakobegger]

Is it?

I thought that a contractor is usually someone who is self-employed, whereas consultants are employed by a consultancy.

[ThirdFoundation]

It's confusing and depends on the industry. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. In some disciplines consultants literally just 'consult' and don't fill a role.

In the accounting world we have employees that we call 'contractors' but they aren't self-employed. Rather, they are employed by a specific accounting staffing agency that contracts with our firm to fill positions temporarily.

Sometimes contractors are employed by the company they are working with directly but the position isn't guaranteed to last before

Basically, like much of the English language, there isn't a hard rule. I imagine there are country, regional, and industry specific uses for the terms. There may have once been a hard distinction, but misuse of terms eventually permeates into local parlance, which gives way to a new accepted use of the term.