After a very close election result in 2018 and a political crisis that lasted several months, the Social Democrat-Green coalition had to reach an agreement with the Liberals and the Centre Party in order to form a government. An important part of this agreement was a commitment to modernize the Employment Protection Act (LAS) so as to adapt it to the current labour market, while still maintaining a fundamental balance between the market’s actors. This in fact boiled down to a question of changing recruitment and termination conditions; a difficult subject because it calls into question one of the foundations of the country’s consensual labor relations model. The government pushed the social partners to negotiate an agreement so it wouldn’t have to make a final decision. After a series of chaotic negotiations, which escalated at the end of October, two of the central trade union bodies finally reached an agreement with Svenskt Näringsliv (Confederation of Swedish Enterprise- employers). The problem is that the primarily blue-collar central LO trade union confederation, remains opposed to the agreement.
In 2019 the government appointed a task force to initiate LAS reform. In June 2020 the task force issued a report proposing various changes, the two most controversial of which were that all companies would be allowed to exempt a maximum of five employees from the mass employment layoff rule of ‘last-in, first-out’, and that small company layoffs (up to 15 employees) could not be invalidated. The centre-right parties and employers’ organizations were largely satisfied with these proposals, whil
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