This happens over and over again in Sweden: skilled worker immigrants get deported over small technicalities, that is often not even their own fault. There have been many examples of this affecting highly skilled engineers in some of Swedens famous (and not famous) tech startups.
What I find disturbing is that immigrant criminals, who haven't contributed to society at all, often do not get sentenced to deportation. So we have the situation that people who are a benefit to the Swedish society get deported, but the criminals get to stay.
> What I find disturbing is that immigrant criminals, who haven't contributed to society at all, often do not get sentenced to deportation.
Correct
Most (of the criminals under threat of deportation) just come with some "creative" story about how they are persecuted in their original country (for being extremists, most likely) and how they will face the death penalty there (while they probably killed or have contributed to the death of many)
No, this isn't correct. Please provide some kind of evidence to provide your racist claim.
I really despise these kind of claims, especially when connected to political correctness. Sweden does not have a problem with political correctness - only the right wing extremists think so. I rather be politically correct (which actually means polite and respectful) than be able to spew hate against minorities without anyone telling me I'm wrong. The term only acts as a way to distract the opponent arguing against racism, sexism or other despicable ideologies. It's effective and Sweden's version of Trumping it.
I agree about the laws being too rigid in regards to working professionals.
That's an opinion piece and not a piece of actual investigate journalism. I'd say the point still stands: the term political correctness was popularized by the racist Sweden Democrats, and is used as I expressed. It's still mainly the right wing extremists that use it, even though it's more common to see populist far righters use it also.
"I rather be politically correct (which actually means polite and respectful"
I didn't see your comment as being very respectful of GP, but quite uncharitable and accusatory. I think that there concept of immigration has many complex facets upon which reasonable people may strongly differ, and that it does nobody any good to be branded a "hater" and disregarded, especially when they offer an opinion in good faith.
Geeze, I appreciate the point about him needing to provide evidence for his unsubstantiated claim; however I don't appreciate the chance to call him a racist. Identifying racism has become a witch hunt that undermines the importance of criticizing actual racism--if every criticism of people which are from a race other than White is racist, then we need to actually find a new word for racism as its definition has turned in to meaning: politically incorrect criticism of an individual.
You think the claim that "they", here referring to immigrants (not defining skin color), isn't racist? It's a generalization on a group of people. And it's a negative one.
Groups of people do bad things all the time. If that group happens to be a protected class you simply can't criticize them w/o fear of this.
What would be racist is if he said "since they are brown, then..." But that isn't what the user said.
Not long ago in human history witch hunts swept across Europe and eventually to America. It was no small thing: millions of innocents were either murdered, tortured or imprisoned... And for what? Better to forget this history about humans exhibiting troubling psychology such as this... You might get labelled a witch yourself, or a Jew, or a racist.
To be fair, we are progressing a lot at least in the sense that racism is actually a real phenomenon, and an undesirable one, but beyond that the witch hunt psychology is part of the same thread through history.
Negative generalizations are, at best, tangentially related to racism. Racism is most fundamentally, "I think blue people are better than green people, because they're blue." Speaking negatively, or positively, of blue or green people would not be racist. Refusing to associate with any green person, because they're green, would be racist. Considering a specific blue Nobel prize winning nuclear scientist to be dumb, because blue people have a statistically lower IQ on average, would also be racist. Observing that mentioned IQ difference and considering that it would be expected to result in a lower than average distribution of aforementioned Nobel prize winning nuclear scientists, would not be racist.
The unofficial existence of "no-go zones" in immigrant areas, the increase in grenade attacks, including against two police stations in the last few months (Helsingborg and Malmö), the increase in rape the last few years (particularly the recent gang rapes in Malmö) - these are all just racist fever dreams I take it?
Most just come with some "creative" story about how they are persecuted in their original country [...] while they probably killed or have contributed to the death of many
Are you really saying that a majority, or even a large fraction, of illegal immigrants to Sweden are murderers or accessories to murder? May I ask: Where did you learn this?
In the US, if you're perfectly productive, legal, highly qualified and well-behaved member of society on H1B from China or India it might still take you 10-15 years to become a resident, so the situation isn't totally rosy here either. And you certainly won't have the right to work on your own idea while you're on that visa, so that's a long time to wait before you can even get started.
Probably explains why so many people will try to game the system and claim to belong to the O-1 category.
Unfortunately, it's because highly skilled people are "boring" (definitely don't mean it as an offense) and don't elicit sympathy. They usually do well for themselves so people don't feel sorry enough to help them
If you are a benefit to society prove it. Pay slips should do it. Easy.
Nobody likes mass immigration in Europe because unlike the US everyone is entitled to housing, healthcare, education. That adds up. And we don't have much need for low skill black market jobs.
If you are an immigrant outside of EU and you are working legally, but you happen to miss some small details in the labour code of Finnish law, you might get kicked out and there is nothing you can do. The faceless bureaucrats don't give a fuck. However if you are unemployed and wielding knife at a local subway station, you will get both the leftist party and Finnish government to act as your personal bodyguard and you'll never have to leave the country against your own will.
This is incorrect. There are many tech companies in Sweden that haven't signed a collective agreement. However, "to obtain a work permit you must [...] have been offered terms of employment that are on par with those set by Swedish collective agreements or which are customary within the occupation or industry" [0]
In this instance he may simply have filed for the wrong kind of visa.
All in all i have come to wonder if thelocal have some kind of agenda. It seems to be willfully ignorant of laws and customs of the nations it reports on.
"It is possible to apply to come to Sweden as an entrepreneur and get a residence permit as an entrepreneur, and in those cases different rules apply."
More countries have different rules for different kinds of visa. Although this case seems special, immigration might not have the means to dig into the details of all their cases. Then being strict on the rules might be the fairest thing overall.
When applying for a work permit you need to show that you aren't undercutting the local workforce. Having a collective agreement in place is one, probably the easier, way to show that.
In Europe many countries have collective employment agreements; for example I am employed under a "commercial" contract. Companies have some leeway on the contract they use (e.g. there is a logistics contact but Amazon Italy uses the same commercial contract as a brick and mortar shop), but they can only improve on what is agreed upon in the national contract, for example by increasing wages above the minimum for your "employment level", adding private health insurance, etc.
I was in a similar position as this entrepreneur. I had the company I created sponsored my own employment visa in Hong Kong. I often took less salary than my employment contract that was provided with the visa application specified because that's what happens sometimes with bootstrapped businesses.
Luckily for me, the Hong Kong government isn't the Swedish government, and didn't give me a hard time when renewing my visa.
It will be Sweden's loss if they deport this entrepreneur.
At least Sweden's government has some teeth when it comes to wages and living standards. Ours (US) could give a shit except for the living standards of the Kochs.
The law is in place to prevent foreign workers from being exploited. That they voluntarily reduce their own salary is not relevant to the implementation (as they could have been pressured to reduce it). Still, the outcome is absurd.
I wonder if it is because of the inherent rigidness of civil law? would a common law system solve this better?
I'm not a Nazi, but rules are rules. If you are intent on immigrating to a country, then it is your duty to read and understand that country's laws. I can't visit Singapore and then claim ignorance if I get fined for spitting.
E.g the guy could have googled "sweden work permit," clicked on the first result, then through to the FAQ:
What is the requirement regarding wages?
To be granted a work permit, you must be offered a wage that is at the level of a Swedish collective agreement or what is normal for the profession or industry. You must also work to such an extent that your wages amount to at least SEK 13,000 a month before tax.
There are too many rules for people to keep track of all of them and they have to be interpreted and enforced with discretion.
So, yes if you get whipped in Singapore for spitting out gum, that is wrong on their part. It is rude to spit gum but you don't deserve to be physically beaten for it.
I don’t see how you can possibly claim the existence of an absolute moral law demonstrating that Singapore is wrong. Your own comment is yet more evidence that law is extemely well publicized, and although I might not myself vote for such a law, I don’t have the arrogance and naïveté to think they are somehow definitely incorrect.
There are things which we can be certain are wrong: murder, rape, etc. A law that punishes gum chewing to some extent or another is not one of them.
Why are the standards suddenly "the existence of an absolute moral law"? You can't demonstrate that there is an "absolute moral law" against murder.
What does an absolute moral law have to do with how well the law is publicized? Note that my awareness of a law is not related to its morality.
And finally, you take the whole point -- that being whipped is an extreme punishment -- and you shove it into this form "to some extent or another." The debate is not about whether we ought to punish chewing gum but about the severity of whipping.
I would say that the grand project he undertook (the critiques of pure reason, practical reason and judgement), although great works in their own right, and a clear articulation of what philosophy is, ultimately failed in their project. (To provide us with guides for what is good, true and beautiful).
That was my first post in this thread, so I’m not sure how I could have changed my position. I argued directly and solely against your claiming Singapore’s law is immoral; if by doing so I’ve somehow switched topics, the person solely responsible is you.
> Note that my awareness of a law is not related to its morality.
Not sure when I said this. I was, though, responding to your claim that “There are too many rules for people to keep track of all of them and they have to be interpreted and enforced with discretion.” Again, if anyone is trying to change the goalposts, it’s you.
> And finally, you take the whole point -- that being whipped is an extreme punishment -- and you shove it into this form "to some extent or another."
Presupposing that it is an extreme punishment for the crime is begging the question. My claim was that it is naive of you to think that you must be right in knowing what the correct penalty for a crime in a gray area like chewing gum, and that Singapore must be wrong.
On the other hand, apparently:
> You can't demonstrate that there is an "absolute moral law" against murder.
... so I am no longer even sure I come from a similar enough culture to attempt to relate Singapore’s to you.
The law mostly works because people follow it, voluntarily, most of the time.
And if enough people break the law (and take steps to prevent themselves from being caught and avoid all consequences, obviously), then eventually the immoral law may as well not be the law because it becomes effectively unenforceable.
"The rules are the rules" is never a good excuse. What matters is the underlying intent and reason for the law.
In this situation, the intent of the law is to prevent employees from being exploited. So a judge should look at it and say "obviously, this person wasn't being exploited, and it is not the intent of the law to deport them in this case".
It's easier to get it wrong than you might think. Sweden doesn't publish a specific "rules for work visas" document. That website is it, and it is not all inclusive. The only way to know all the rules of the visa are to read the actual laws (in Swedish, and in Swedish "legalese", so good luck to foreigners... the people who would need to know), and to read all of the relevant case law around it. On your first days in a country, you probably aren't perusing the rulings of their high courts.
In this guy's case, there is very relevant case law. Before March 2015 Migrationsverket applied the rules based on the average of your work visa period, 2 years. They would take your last 2 year's salary, divide by 24, and see if it's over 13,000 kr per month. After March 2015, following new case law, they started looking at each month individually and deporting if any specific month violated the rules.
Depending on when he did this, it is possible that if he asked a migration attorney for guidance they would have approved, and they would have been correct. The rules retroactively changed that year. It still would be just as likely to make the wrong decision after the court ruling, since migration court rulings aren't a particularly big topic of conversation for most people. Nobody really learned about it until deportations started skyrocketing in 2016.
There is also a pretty visible "Contact us" link with phone numbers and email addresses: https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Contact-us.html So I can not feel sorry for him because he should have known. Had he been given incorrect information, it would have been a different matter. I also believe that the Swedish rules for work permits for immigrants are among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world. But you know more than me about that.
Hah, I just noticed that you consult to a tjänstepension company!
My experience with MV on the phone is that they won't answer any specific questions about the rules. According to some migration attorneys I spoke with, many of the rules are undefined and they make them up as they go. Did you see the one about the guy who was deported for not taking _unpaid_ vacation? Try to find _that_ requirement on lagen.nu ;)
Everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've interviewed with in the last 2 years has had employees get deported. In all cases, they (the companies) claim that the information that they got from the big HR consultancies and from Migrationsverket was faulty, and they're paying the price now. I'm not saying that it's okay to break the rules, but I will say that if breaking them accidentally is so common, something is wrong with the system.
Every job offer I've ever received in Sweden (5) has been illegal on the first pass, violating various requirements of work visas. Violations are typically things like tjänstepension not starting until after the 6 month trial period. The most common is that the job ad was only posted on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not on Arbetsförmedlingen.
Two of my friends got hit because their employer insurance plans didn't become "active" until their second day at work. You know, those plans that your employer takes out on your behalf and you can't even see if they exist, let alone when they started? So it goes.
In 2014 I would have agreed strongly with "among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world", but in 2018 I would add the caveat "but worse than most of Europe."
Yes, it's an employer-paid pension that is very similar to the U.S. 401(K). Depending on how you slice it, Swedish pensions are divided into 3 or 4 layers:
1) Income pension - equivalent to U.S. social security. Taken out of everyone's taxes, and you have no control over it.
2) Premium pension - it's considered part of Income pension (1), but when you earn above some amount it goes into this bucket and you can tell the government a bit about how you want it to be invested.
3) Occupational pension (tjänstepension) - An "optional" employer-paid pension that you have some direct control over. Depending on the management company, you can either choose between a few fixed investment schemes, or you can have full control over it and invest in stocks/mutual funds. It is "optional", but mandated by the unions, so not really optional.
4) Private pension - your own personal account, like an IRA
There were a bunch of deportations over tjänstepension problems. Companies that were not in unions paid employees that were not in unions and didn't offer the same tjänstepension as the union agreement. Migrationsverket decided (also in 2015) that the exact terms of the union agreements are required for all non-EU citizens, even if they aren't involved with the unions. (If you are Swedish or from the EU, there is no legal requirement.)
I got in trouble because the union requires a 4.5% tjänstepension contribution from your employer. My employer paid 8% to mine, but it was structured in a different way... which we later found out was unacceptable.
2018. People have to explicitly state that they are not nazis when stating the obvious.
Thanks leftists.
I would accept those tight rules if Sweden did something to their immigration disaster i.e. the endless numbers of migrant gangs and criminals terrorising Sweden without getting deported.
All this might be true but the discrepancy between the way the rules are enforced for those who take care of themselves and show potential for being of benefit to society versus the near total lack of deportation of criminal foreigners is having a big impact on the way people view the actions of the justice department and other institutions. It has now come so far that there are nearly daily occurrences of this lackadaisical attitude from prosecutors and district courts where criminals are slapped on the wrist for aggravated rape, robbery, manslaughter and downright murder.
The government - I'm tempted to put the term between scare quotes - claims that they want to work towards the reduction of negative attitudes towards migrants from the Middle-East and Africa but their actions lead to exactly the opposite.
This is not just a big-city problem either. I live in a small community (13.000 people spread over about 350 km2 in the west of Sweden) where the local council has hired two recent immigrants for a project to "promote integration and reduce fighting between immigrant factions" at the local primary school. Unbeknown to outsiders but known by the council was that one of them had been arrested for trying to kill members of an opposing clan. Both have been arrested for sexual assault against girls at the school. Neither of them faces deportation, neither of them faces prison. No explanation nor apology from the council for their lack of oversight and common sense and - probably even worse - no way to discuss this without being labelled 'racist'.
Actions like these only serve to increase the pressure in an already turbulent country. Going by the letter of the law where it concerns people who mean well while turning a blind eye - and even showing consideration and understanding - towards criminals has the potential to break one of the main factors which made it possible for Sweden to become the success it was: the large trust in society and its institutions. Without this trust there is no way for the current welfare state to continue, and without the welfare state Sweden will no longer be the country it used to be.
There are also cases of immigrants being deported for taking a second job to pay the bills because the law for a worker's visa says that it applies to "a job" as in singular [0]. The same applies if you quit a lousy job and find a new one [1].
I suspect it's game theory; the public reacts more negatively to allowing immigrants the right to stay since it means they get access to integration programs while the public might get mad over an incident like this but not the overall trend of being overly rigid. The choice becomes pretty easy politically.
This outcome seems perverse, but I understand how it is an extension of the idea that the government can set minimum salaries.
By paying less for labor, even his own, his company gets an advantage. The only way for his competitors to compete with cheap labor would be hiring their own cheap labor, but that creates the condition (low wage for labor) Sweden wants to solve.
Why should the regulations around minimum wage apply differently to him than to others? Of course, it seems perverse because we know that he really wants to have a lower wage, that it really is in his best interest to have a lower wage, etc but at the same time, that might apply to many people who would want to work at below minimum wage.
If you think the government should set rules like "You must earn X or be deported" then it seems to me you have no reason to be upset with this result.
Tl;dr: Immigrant employee of a company has salary reduced below the amount[1] specified in his visa; the government refuses to extend his visa even though he says, "It's ok! Really!"
[1] Presumably set high enough that foreign workers don't drive down the wages of locals.
65 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 95.9 ms ] threadWhat I find disturbing is that immigrant criminals, who haven't contributed to society at all, often do not get sentenced to deportation. So we have the situation that people who are a benefit to the Swedish society get deported, but the criminals get to stay.
Correct
Most (of the criminals under threat of deportation) just come with some "creative" story about how they are persecuted in their original country (for being extremists, most likely) and how they will face the death penalty there (while they probably killed or have contributed to the death of many)
I agree about the laws being too rigid in regards to working professionals.
The Guardian (UK) is hardly an extremist right-wing publication, and it begs to disagree:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/13/sex-as...
(Edit: this getting hammered by downvotes is an example of PC in action.)
You're moving the goalposts.
I didn't see your comment as being very respectful of GP, but quite uncharitable and accusatory. I think that there concept of immigration has many complex facets upon which reasonable people may strongly differ, and that it does nobody any good to be branded a "hater" and disregarded, especially when they offer an opinion in good faith.
What would be racist is if he said "since they are brown, then..." But that isn't what the user said.
Not long ago in human history witch hunts swept across Europe and eventually to America. It was no small thing: millions of innocents were either murdered, tortured or imprisoned... And for what? Better to forget this history about humans exhibiting troubling psychology such as this... You might get labelled a witch yourself, or a Jew, or a racist.
To be fair, we are progressing a lot at least in the sense that racism is actually a real phenomenon, and an undesirable one, but beyond that the witch hunt psychology is part of the same thread through history.
Are you really saying that a majority, or even a large fraction, of illegal immigrants to Sweden are murderers or accessories to murder? May I ask: Where did you learn this?
Of course not
The context was set by the phrase I quoted, which is that of "immigrant criminals" (and I'm not considering that a pleonasm, as some might)
Probably explains why so many people will try to game the system and claim to belong to the O-1 category.
It's kind of a paradox
Nobody likes mass immigration in Europe because unlike the US everyone is entitled to housing, healthcare, education. That adds up. And we don't have much need for low skill black market jobs.
If you are an immigrant outside of EU and you are working legally, but you happen to miss some small details in the labour code of Finnish law, you might get kicked out and there is nothing you can do. The faceless bureaucrats don't give a fuck. However if you are unemployed and wielding knife at a local subway station, you will get both the leftist party and Finnish government to act as your personal bodyguard and you'll never have to leave the country against your own will.
Assuming there is an angle the thelocal.se is trying to hide.
[0]: https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
All in all i have come to wonder if thelocal have some kind of agenda. It seems to be willfully ignorant of laws and customs of the nations it reports on.
"It is possible to apply to come to Sweden as an entrepreneur and get a residence permit as an entrepreneur, and in those cases different rules apply."
More countries have different rules for different kinds of visa. Although this case seems special, immigration might not have the means to dig into the details of all their cases. Then being strict on the rules might be the fairest thing overall.
https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
Luckily for me, the Hong Kong government isn't the Swedish government, and didn't give me a hard time when renewing my visa.
It will be Sweden's loss if they deport this entrepreneur.
Then stop voting for Koch crony-republicans and tea party fundamentalists.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I wonder if it is because of the inherent rigidness of civil law? would a common law system solve this better?
E.g the guy could have googled "sweden work permit," clicked on the first result, then through to the FAQ:
What is the requirement regarding wages?
To be granted a work permit, you must be offered a wage that is at the level of a Swedish collective agreement or what is normal for the profession or industry. You must also work to such an extent that your wages amount to at least SEK 13,000 a month before tax.
https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...
So, yes if you get whipped in Singapore for spitting out gum, that is wrong on their part. It is rude to spit gum but you don't deserve to be physically beaten for it.
There are things which we can be certain are wrong: murder, rape, etc. A law that punishes gum chewing to some extent or another is not one of them.
Why are the standards suddenly "the existence of an absolute moral law"? You can't demonstrate that there is an "absolute moral law" against murder.
What does an absolute moral law have to do with how well the law is publicized? Note that my awareness of a law is not related to its morality.
And finally, you take the whole point -- that being whipped is an extreme punishment -- and you shove it into this form "to some extent or another." The debate is not about whether we ought to punish chewing gum but about the severity of whipping.
Kant tried to.
I would say that the grand project he undertook (the critiques of pure reason, practical reason and judgement), although great works in their own right, and a clear articulation of what philosophy is, ultimately failed in their project. (To provide us with guides for what is good, true and beautiful).
That was my first post in this thread, so I’m not sure how I could have changed my position. I argued directly and solely against your claiming Singapore’s law is immoral; if by doing so I’ve somehow switched topics, the person solely responsible is you.
> Note that my awareness of a law is not related to its morality.
Not sure when I said this. I was, though, responding to your claim that “There are too many rules for people to keep track of all of them and they have to be interpreted and enforced with discretion.” Again, if anyone is trying to change the goalposts, it’s you.
> And finally, you take the whole point -- that being whipped is an extreme punishment -- and you shove it into this form "to some extent or another."
Presupposing that it is an extreme punishment for the crime is begging the question. My claim was that it is naive of you to think that you must be right in knowing what the correct penalty for a crime in a gray area like chewing gum, and that Singapore must be wrong.
On the other hand, apparently:
> You can't demonstrate that there is an "absolute moral law" against murder.
... so I am no longer even sure I come from a similar enough culture to attempt to relate Singapore’s to you.
The law mostly works because people follow it, voluntarily, most of the time.
And if enough people break the law (and take steps to prevent themselves from being caught and avoid all consequences, obviously), then eventually the immoral law may as well not be the law because it becomes effectively unenforceable.
"The rules are the rules" is never a good excuse. What matters is the underlying intent and reason for the law.
In this situation, the intent of the law is to prevent employees from being exploited. So a judge should look at it and say "obviously, this person wasn't being exploited, and it is not the intent of the law to deport them in this case".
In this guy's case, there is very relevant case law. Before March 2015 Migrationsverket applied the rules based on the average of your work visa period, 2 years. They would take your last 2 year's salary, divide by 24, and see if it's over 13,000 kr per month. After March 2015, following new case law, they started looking at each month individually and deporting if any specific month violated the rules.
Depending on when he did this, it is possible that if he asked a migration attorney for guidance they would have approved, and they would have been correct. The rules retroactively changed that year. It still would be just as likely to make the wrong decision after the court ruling, since migration court rulings aren't a particularly big topic of conversation for most people. Nobody really learned about it until deportations started skyrocketing in 2016.
I wrote a bit about the topic here: http://dontdeportthedog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Failu...
My experience with MV on the phone is that they won't answer any specific questions about the rules. According to some migration attorneys I spoke with, many of the rules are undefined and they make them up as they go. Did you see the one about the guy who was deported for not taking _unpaid_ vacation? Try to find _that_ requirement on lagen.nu ;)
Everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've interviewed with in the last 2 years has had employees get deported. In all cases, they (the companies) claim that the information that they got from the big HR consultancies and from Migrationsverket was faulty, and they're paying the price now. I'm not saying that it's okay to break the rules, but I will say that if breaking them accidentally is so common, something is wrong with the system.
Every job offer I've ever received in Sweden (5) has been illegal on the first pass, violating various requirements of work visas. Violations are typically things like tjänstepension not starting until after the 6 month trial period. The most common is that the job ad was only posted on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not on Arbetsförmedlingen.
Two of my friends got hit because their employer insurance plans didn't become "active" until their second day at work. You know, those plans that your employer takes out on your behalf and you can't even see if they exist, let alone when they started? So it goes.
In 2014 I would have agreed strongly with "among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world", but in 2018 I would add the caveat "but worse than most of Europe."
1) Income pension - equivalent to U.S. social security. Taken out of everyone's taxes, and you have no control over it.
2) Premium pension - it's considered part of Income pension (1), but when you earn above some amount it goes into this bucket and you can tell the government a bit about how you want it to be invested.
3) Occupational pension (tjänstepension) - An "optional" employer-paid pension that you have some direct control over. Depending on the management company, you can either choose between a few fixed investment schemes, or you can have full control over it and invest in stocks/mutual funds. It is "optional", but mandated by the unions, so not really optional.
4) Private pension - your own personal account, like an IRA
There were a bunch of deportations over tjänstepension problems. Companies that were not in unions paid employees that were not in unions and didn't offer the same tjänstepension as the union agreement. Migrationsverket decided (also in 2015) that the exact terms of the union agreements are required for all non-EU citizens, even if they aren't involved with the unions. (If you are Swedish or from the EU, there is no legal requirement.)
I got in trouble because the union requires a 4.5% tjänstepension contribution from your employer. My employer paid 8% to mine, but it was structured in a different way... which we later found out was unacceptable.
Thanks leftists.
I would accept those tight rules if Sweden did something to their immigration disaster i.e. the endless numbers of migrant gangs and criminals terrorising Sweden without getting deported.
The government - I'm tempted to put the term between scare quotes - claims that they want to work towards the reduction of negative attitudes towards migrants from the Middle-East and Africa but their actions lead to exactly the opposite.
This is not just a big-city problem either. I live in a small community (13.000 people spread over about 350 km2 in the west of Sweden) where the local council has hired two recent immigrants for a project to "promote integration and reduce fighting between immigrant factions" at the local primary school. Unbeknown to outsiders but known by the council was that one of them had been arrested for trying to kill members of an opposing clan. Both have been arrested for sexual assault against girls at the school. Neither of them faces deportation, neither of them faces prison. No explanation nor apology from the council for their lack of oversight and common sense and - probably even worse - no way to discuss this without being labelled 'racist'.
Actions like these only serve to increase the pressure in an already turbulent country. Going by the letter of the law where it concerns people who mean well while turning a blind eye - and even showing consideration and understanding - towards criminals has the potential to break one of the main factors which made it possible for Sweden to become the success it was: the large trust in society and its institutions. Without this trust there is no way for the current welfare state to continue, and without the welfare state Sweden will no longer be the country it used to be.
I suspect it's game theory; the public reacts more negatively to allowing immigrants the right to stay since it means they get access to integration programs while the public might get mad over an incident like this but not the overall trend of being overly rigid. The choice becomes pretty easy politically.
[0] http://viralt.aftonbladet.se/sheikh-29-ska-utvisas-fran-sver... [1] https://digital.di.se/artikel/han-fick-jobb-som-utvecklare--...
By paying less for labor, even his own, his company gets an advantage. The only way for his competitors to compete with cheap labor would be hiring their own cheap labor, but that creates the condition (low wage for labor) Sweden wants to solve.
Why should the regulations around minimum wage apply differently to him than to others? Of course, it seems perverse because we know that he really wants to have a lower wage, that it really is in his best interest to have a lower wage, etc but at the same time, that might apply to many people who would want to work at below minimum wage.
If you think the government should set rules like "You must earn X or be deported" then it seems to me you have no reason to be upset with this result.
[1] Presumably set high enough that foreign workers don't drive down the wages of locals.