[mingusrude]

As commented above, you have to do it this way in Sweden, you have to announce in public that you are going to lay off people and then from there on you negotiate with the union if you plan to not do stack-based firing (last-in-first-out).

[occz]

There's no collective agreement in place at Klarna.

[phphphphp]

That’s not what they’re doing though, they’ve announced it and plan to tell people over the next few days, certainly not enough time to negotiate with a union. They’ve already chosen who is being let go, they’re simply delaying the process of informing people because (presumably) managers only have a certain capacity for meetings: they think a delayed face-to-face meeting is better than an immediate email.

[mingusrude]

For Swedish employees it's not as easy as calling someone into an office and lay them off. You can of course tell someone that you want to lay them off but from there to actually doing it you have to negotiate with the union and/or the employee.

[phphphphp]

Right, and I’m arguing that informing 700 people today that they’re being laid off is more humane by an order of magnitude than telling 7,000 people they might be laid off this week and to stay away from their peers. There’s nothing in Swedish employment law that dictates this approach by Klarna. The letter clearly states why they made this decision, it wasn’t a legal one, it was a misguided attempt devoid of empathy focused exclusively on external optics because of what happened with better.com etc.