The Employment Protection Act, ( sv, Lagen om anställningsskydd, often abbreviated as ''LAS'') is a labour-market regulation in

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

. The current law was adopted and entered into the Code of Statutes in 1982, when it replaced a previous Employment Protection Act from 1974. It provides extensive protection for employees from termination and regulates some employment contracts. Swedish labour market regulation generally relies heavily on

collective bargaining Collective bargaining is a process of negotiation between employers and a group of employees aimed at agreements to regulate working salaries, working conditions, benefits, and other aspects of workers' compensation and rights for workers. The i ...

between

trade unions A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and Employee ben ...

and

Employers' organization An employers' organization or employers' association is a collective organization of manufacturers, retailers, or other employers of wage labor. Employers' organizations seek to coordinate the behavior of their member companies in matters of mutual ...

s. Even though several parts of the Employment Protection act can be overrun by collective agreements, it still constitutes an extensive direct state regulation.

Regulation

The Employment Protection act regulates

termination of employment Termination of employment or separation of employment is an employee's departure from a job and the end of an employee's duration with an employer. Termination may be voluntary on the employee's part, or it may be at the hands of the employer, of ...

and minimum notice times, priority of rehiring, and lawful reasons for termination (restricted to redundancy and personal reasons like misconduct). In case of termination due to redundancy, the law requires workplaces to fire their staff according to a list of seniority ( sv, turordningslista). Given similar tasks, the last employee to be hired will be the first to be fired. In the case of similar age amongst employees, priority is given to older employees. The Employment Protection act primarily protects employees hired on indefinite contracts ( sv, tillsvidareanställning). Employees on contracts with predefined limited times of employment may still be terminated outside the seniority hierarchy of their workplace. The fifth paragraph of the act states that employees who have been hired on limited-time contracts by the same employer during two years within a five-year period must be rehired on an indefinite contract.

Political implications

The act adopted in 1974 marked a breaking point of a largely hands-off attitude by the state in place since the established with the

Saltsjöbaden Agreement The Saltsjöbad Agreement ( sv, Saltsjöbadsavtalet) is a Swedish labour market treaty signed between the Swedish Trade Union Confederation ( sv, Landsorganisationen, LO) and the Swedish Employers Association ( sv, Svenska arbetsgivareföreningen ...

in 1938. Even though the act circumscribes the extent to which collective bargaining regulates the labour-market, left-wing supporters of the claim the benefits of act's labour security and promotion of indefinite contracts. Liberal critics, on the other hand, claim that decreased flexibility increases thresholds to hiring and blocks employers from firing incompetent labour.

References

{{Reflist Swedish labour law 1982 in Sweden 1974 in Sweden