Not everything is good in Sweden: What may be potential problems here?

"From-cradle-to-grave" is a typical image that pops into our head when it comes to Swedish society. I believe most of people from outside of Sweden admire the welfare system pretty much. 

Not everything is good in Sweden: What may be potential problems here? 

Credits: Cecilia Larsson Lantz/Imagebank.sweden.se

I remember there was a time having fika in a friend's birthday party, one German girl said that if she works in Germany, she can expect that she will quite possibly work overtime, like ~9 hours, and thus she really wants to find a job in Sweden. At that moment, I was so surprised that even German think Sweden is better. If considering 9-10 hours working time in Germany is desperately bad, then one can says that working in Asia, such as in Taiwan or South Korea, is like a slave....

How nice the working environment it is! In Sweden, there is even a 6 hours working time trial on-going now. 

Credits: Lena Granefelt/imagebank.sweden.se

In spite of the seemed-perfect system in Sweden, there are still lots of problems in Sweden. As indicated by my assigned literature, "The Modern-day Vikings: A Practical Guide to Interacting with the Swedes" (in Chapter 2), there were 2 major problems from 1980s to early 2000s. First was the immigrant issue, and the other one was the increasing conflicts between labors & employers.

16 years has passed since the publication of the book in 2001, and the fate of 2 major problems differs a lot. For immigrant issue, Sweden started to embrace political immigrants from 1970s, and in recent years lots of refugees from west Asia come to Sweden due to long-lasting war, particularly huge amount in 2015 (~200,000 in a year). We can definitely say that this issue is not only no improvement but even becoming the most severe and controversial issue these days in Sweden (and this topic worth another article to discuss). However, the second one, conflicts between employers and labors, seems being less discussed recently. The author argued that the conflicts happened when Swedish companies faced the competition of cheaper products from those countries with lower wage level. Because of the assurance of rather high salary by Swedish law and powerful labor union, these companies encountered a hard dilemma. This problem was severe in particular when global business boomed and when Sweden joined EU. 

But, where are these problems now?

Are they solved?

Credits: Guillaume de Basly/imagebank.sweden.se

I am not sure. What I know now is that most of the big companies from Sweden has turned into international companies, which means they have several branch offices and factories around the world. To my knowledge, like Volvo and H&M, they have factories in China and Bangladesh respectively. They exploit local people with lower wage, and sell their cheap products all over the world in order to keep profiting. 

Interestingly, if in this case, lots of companies & factories moved out of Sweden, which definitely resulted in a lack of jobs and the increasing of unemployment rate, then how did Swedish government deal with this as more immigrants and refugees came? How did they stimulate the labor market in the meantime companies kept moving out of Sweden?

I reckon this would be very worth to dig into it!