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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

Every other company seems to be able to deal with it; it’s just Elmo struggling. You can see that Sweden wouldn’t be keen to rearrange society to suit one company that employs a whole 120 people.

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It’s fine to say that companies should comply with local laws. It’s also fine to say that the laws may be leading a country to long term economic decline even if it’s temporarily ok.

Okay, but what leads you to believe that this system (it’s not a law, as such, though it is implied by the law) is doing that? Like, just this incident?

GDP trends over the past couple decades (2008 being the common comparison Point for US:Europe) and just general observations of business trends mostly. A lot of Europeans speak proudly of their economic laws as “dignified” versus what you get in America. And perhaps that is true. But if this leads to lower and lower economic opportunity for Europeans, what will future generations say? Will they be glad their grandparents had such dignified rights? Or will they call them entitled pricks who squandered it?

Europe is in a tough place. The US is going to eat its economic opportunities up due to the war in Ukraine AND make a killing selling them natural gas. This is probably the bigger driver of things right now than the business environment and that sucks. But it all plays a part.

I don’t care about this particular incident. European unions are better than our unions because you get to choose which you want to be a part of. Sweden appears to do even better than average per the article on lost days to strikes.

... Do you have any particular reason to think that Swedish economic growth is restricted by its labour system? I think it's really difficult to make that argument just looking at the numbers; it has generally outperformed the far less worker-friendly southern EU states, say (except possibly Spain). To explain the 21st century US/EU growth gap, I'd personally probably be looking at fiscal policy and the aging population (while this is a problem in both blocs, the EU is further down the rabbit hole), not _labour law_.

The labor system is one of many components of the European business environment that makes it difficult to innovate.

The aging population and how it is financially supported is a factor. Immigration as well. Which is in turn driven by economic activity.

Not really something to be summed up here in detail.

Exactly. Though, I definitely don't think economic decline is ok at this moment in our society especially while we burn through as much resources as we do.

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