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“‘For us, automation is something good,” says Fredrik Hases, 41, who heads the local union chapter representing technicians.
‘No one feels like they are taking jobs away. It’s about doing more with the people we’ve got.’”
Swedish labor leaders much more confident in the capabilities of their leadership and their workers.
There’s an urban legend that one of the socialist leaders of the Portuguese revolution of 1974 told Olof Palme, then Swedish PM, that the aim of the revolution was to get rid of the rich, to which Palme replied “in Sweden we’re trying to get rid of the poor”.
Similar vibe.
How does their govt train people for new jobs and make that transition smoothly? Sounds like a lot we can learn.
If a company wants to automate jobs, pay and generous buyout of pensions would be top of mind.
Swedes also have a robust universal social safety net that people historically have utilized free of stigma. This labor attitude doesn’t work in the US because our workers have been shafted historically by capital, and thus have a prime motivation to SURVIVE.
This doesn’t actually address the problem, it just helps to temporarily delay the inevitable. AI/automation is replacing human labor in all industries. We’re probably going to need to go the UBI route within a decade..
Beautiful words, but "new jobs" mean necessity to build a new network of "fixers" in sectors where "friends" decide if you get 10 or 1000 orders per month. This is why in many countries and many sectors unions specifically because they are not opposing the technology itself, but
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Nicklas 
T
T@NicklasNilsso14
This is the mindset of Unions - all are the same, don’t be fooled by their propaganda!
Here is 10 historic cases where the Union fought the future and innovations!
Read and think about it.
x.com/nicklasnilsso1…
x.com/nicklasnilsso1…Show more
Seems fairly basic. Why exactly are unions limited to trade? Can't we just negotiate our own social welfare benefits in voluntary groups?
The way to protect jobs is to create them.
Harnessing the Forces of Creative Destruction
This… the same union going after Tesla because their employees don’t want to unionize.
The union leaders in the US could care less about the workers just about the money they get
Seems like the ILA can take a few pages from Sweden. Maybe they should have negotiated incorporating their workers into transitioning into becoming a part of automation/the future instead of making grinch like remarks threatening their fellow Americans with misery and pain. I’m
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It’s evolution. A man in the crane will be as useful as our prehensile tails. #AI
Swedish unions have close relationship to the politicians and have several laws giving them advantage over the employers. That’s a bad thing. Unless you are a commie and hate free markets.
We don’t do that. Our country couldn’t care less about its citizens.
We have an entire region of the country known as the “rust belt”. Then there’s Appalachia which was used up, shut down and completely destroyed. The New York Times and costal elites openly mock these people
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Indeed. Instead we get a rent seeking tyrant attempting to extort the country.
until more people realize that they believe organic AI is old technology. You assholes are such dystopian turds
So Swedes are not caught up in the most ridiculous economic fallacy as the Americans. Got it.
Sweden gets it. Evolution involves adopting traits that propel us forward, where manual labor becomes as obsolete as a vestigial tail. #AI
Union density in Sweden is 70% and they have one of the more generous welfare systems in the world. Maybe that would change their approach to technology in a different way then US blue collar workers who are one job loss away from working at Chipotle
Sure, all we need is sectoral bargaining, a tsunami of unionization that leaves the union membership rate well above the historical American peak, and to spend something like 2-3% of GDP on job-adjustment policies. Then we can have techno-optimist unions.
You interested in that?
you want the good unions without the good labor law and it's not going to happen. these things have to be done in order and the US is a century behind.
This doesn’t withstand scrutiny. The job pool continually shrinks in this scenario; it does not remain constant, allowing workers to simply transition to different jobs.
I visited Hungary in the late 90s where they still had State Farm’s. They still had people raising horses despite having a JD dealership. I asked them why? They said they needed the jobs for these workers. Apparently they couldn’t be transitioned to other roles.
It's almost like they have an entirely different system of government and entirely different rules for unions corporations and workers than in the United States.
I suspect the ILA has a sweetheart deal. There are very, very few other places they could get the same kind of deal. And they have a huge amount of leverage by controlling a public resource. Per their leader, they seem very willing to use that leverage, even if it hurts others.
do their labor unions span the entire EU?
if we had labor unions that only worked within one state, and states competed with each other, i think this attitude would exist here too.
I think this highlights one of my main issues with unions. I’m fine with protecting workers, I’m not ok with forcing inefficiency. That drives up costs for everyone involved.
Yup works differently in the UK …..
We have lots of jobs and a large percentage of people who don’t want them ….Fortunately the Gov ensure these people are well looked after and better off not working .
Not sure they’d care too much for this Swedish nonsense !
The difference is that Sweden is, by almost every metric, a better place to live than the United States lol. Of course they will handle automation better. Everything is literally run better there.
There's so much work that needs to be done in America. We're just wasting time trying to fight automation of rather simple tasks to keep a few people employed. This is how great economies fail.
Sweden also has a massive social safety net, so the welfare of those who may become redundant is not at risk. If you want unions to act like this, their workers have to be protected when their job goes away.
In Denmark, the union for financial services was a founding member of the Fintech community. It’s a question of mindset.
So very true...this is why US ports are always at the bottom of the list for port productivity (barring a couple like Philadelphia). Even the fully automated ones like Long beach are at the bottom of the list (perhaps because they don't have enough cranes so wait times are long).
How do we make US workers and unions look at the future this way? Would be so much more beneficial for all of us.
Must be an old article because ylva johansson is not in the current cabinet
"I would simply fundamentally reshape the American employer's attitude to its workers. Sorry about your job in the meantime."
American labor leaders explicitly oppose sectoral bargaining
Totally agreed but I do wonder how trainable the average dockworker is in terms of their capability to adapt to computer work to have machines do it. In that way, we might be different from Northern Europe
Ok sure that's great but we don't protect workers here in the US anywhere near like in Sweden.
The problem is in America we don't protect the workers so the workers and their unions fight technology that will put them out of work with no alternatives.
This is what I was thinking. They would stay with their employer and be trained in a new job, one that’s likely less stressful.
The real issue is unions have little to no say in managing production so they’re only ever defensive and reactive
It's the only proper way.
We can't keep driving buggies because we are afraid of losing jobs of buggy whip makers, the World will pass us by.
The US is missing a key ingredient that Sweden has: a robust welfare state. If you lose your job to automation, you are given *every* opportunity to go back to school and re-skill for new jobs.
Paradoxically, protecting jobs is what causes you to lose them. As we fail to automate and innovate, industries lose international competitiveness and the jobs leave anyway.
Yeah right, factory workers in Sweden can be trained as coders for Spotify.
Check what's really going on with the working class in Sweden after they pulled in one million migrants over five years.
Great perspective. Here's another one in a similar vein that I very much appreciate:
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American Solidarity Party 
@AmSolidarity
Replying to @AmSolidarity
But we need to go past class struggle and reach class cooperation; give the workers an ownership stake in the operations so they can benefit from the productivity of new technology rather than only react out of fear for their livelihoods.
It is, and is an attitude born out of the system of care which includes free education, workers councils, affordable subsidises housing, and mostly free health care and so on. This means the risks and therefor work relationships are quite different.
Tell that to USA dock workers...... striking to prevent automation.....uhm ok..... so remove containers and go back to nets/individual items being moved???
Made redundant at a decent UK tech company. Paid off.
Colleague recounted how at his previous company, his European colleagues jobs would go, but they would be found new jobs internally.
Up sides to both. But there's more potential downside to the UK way?