3-31-05, 9:18 am

For Once, Capitalism Gone Sane!

It is rare that one finds examples today of rationale adjustments to the capitalist 'marketplace,' but I came across one in an English edition story from the prominent French newspaper, Liberation. It concerns a Swedish policy of paid 'sabbaticals' for workers as a way to reduce long-term unemployment.

First of all, Sweden is a capitalist country with what is still the most advanced welfare state on earth. It is a small country (under 10 million people) which has been governed by the Social Democratic Party, sometimes in coalition with other parties, for most of the last 75 years. Sweden’s staying out of the two World Wars also played a positive role in increasing the power of its labor movement, even though Swedish Social Democrats cynically engaged in trade relations with Nazi occupied Europe during World War II to both protect and profit from the country’s neutrality.

The Swedish Communist Party historically and, according to Liberation, today, the Green party, have acted as a left opposition that has kept the Swedish Social Democrats from openly betraying their labor base, which British Laborites did many times before Tony Blair moved the party away from even its moderate social democratic traditions and European Social Democrats in Germany and other countries have routinely done.

As a capitalist country, Sweden experienced the higher levels of unemployment and a fiscal crisis that the restructuring of capital produced everywhere in the 1980s and 1980s. For most workers though, unemployment in countries with advanced welfare states like Sweden was usually preferable to working in the millions of 'new' cheap labor jobs that American workers were compelled to take in the Wal-Mart-MacDonald’s sector of the U.S. economy that accompanied American 'de-industrialization.' This 'American growth model,' however, has been hailed by rightist economists through the world. When social benefits are counted in, U.S. 'hamburger flipper' jobs in the service sector usually paid less than long-term unemployment benefits in advanced welfare state countries like Sweden).

Increased unemployment everywhere often produced greater stress for workers who now had to perform more with less staff – clerical workers, nurses, white collar professional employees were particularly hit hard. While U.S. corporations and public sector institutions have continued to increase worker stress by reducing jobs and benefits (and maybe adding insult to injury by throwing in a 'stress management' program here, the Swedish government is trying something more positive.

While the spots in the sabbatical pilot program are currently limited to twelve thousand (pressure from the Green party led the Social Democrats to grudgingly implement the plan) and there are restrictions, the benefits are still remarkable. Workers with two are more years in the workforce can take the Sabbatical for three to twelve months. They are paid at 85% of what there unemployment benefit would be or 68% of their annual wage or salary, with a cap for very high wage workers. They can do pretty much what they wish with their free time. Women workers, workers over the age of 50, and workers particularly in the health care industry, where cutbacks have made stressful jobs much more stressful, have provided most of the applicants, which currently are running at more than twice the number of 'sabbaticals' available.

Even though conservative politicians are trying to undermine the program (by compelling employees who take sabbaticals participate in education and training programs to improve their work skills) and employers are not so willing to hire handicapped people and other long-term unemployed for whom the jobs were intended, the sabbaticals are, according to Liberation, working.

First, sick leave benefits, which are generous in Sweden, had shot up substantially after 2000 with the cutbacks and the increase in worker stress. The sabbaticals, for their supporters, are not only ways to spread work around, but also to improve the quality of life for workers by reducing their stress levels. Ironically, around 6% of workers have used the sabbaticals to start businesses of their own and 20% have voluntarily received professional training that has increased the value of their labor to the community. The battle goes on in Sweden, with the Social Democrats’ labor minister stating that the sabbaticals are a 'possibility, not a right' (in Sweden workers see their social benefits as rights), conservatives trying to kill the program, and the left trying to extend and develop the program as improving the quality of life both for individual workers and for society as a whole.

While no Marxist believes that the welfare state is a long-term and stable solution to capitalism’s general crisis, the enormous differences between what the Swedish government has done as a pilot project and what the U.S. government has done in the past should be clear. Whereas both private and public universities (I have taught in a public university for 34 years) are adopting a corporate model to treat professors and other professional employees as interchangeable white collar workers, the Swedish government has embarked upon a policy of treating workers as colleagues (to use the university term) worthy of respect and valuable free time for professional development.

If the Bush administration, which supports Wal-Mart and other corporations in their undermining of overtime pay benefits, aids and abets corporations that gut existing health and pension plans and encourages state and local governments to follow the corporate model for public employees, learned about the Swedish plan, they might add Sweden to the 'Axis of Evil' and launch 'Operation Swedish Freedom' to liberate the country from the horrors of paid maternity leaves, free public higher education, public day care, generous unemployment benefits, the sabbatical program, and other policies that produce fear and loathing in country club Republicans.

While Sweden, in the larger battle between capitalism and socialism remains 'neutral,' as it was during the World Wars and the Cold War, it still represents a capitalism that the working class can live with, unlike the capitalism we know all too well in the United States, which is stressful at best for the great majority of workers in good times and horrific for the poor at all times.

At the end of Catch-22, Yossarian, the hero, tries to escape the lunacy of a war directed by murderous bureaucrats and capitalists by making it to Sweden, a neutral country. That, of course, isn’t a serious solution. But the U.S. labor and progressive movements can adopt seriously programs and policies from an advanced welfare state country like Sweden, educate millions of workers about them, fight for them, and then implement them once the power of the right Republicans is broken, is possible. Such policies would give tens of millions of working people something positive to fight for, a program to turn progressive coalitions into more unified movements offering alternatives to both Bush and those Democrats who merely point out the injustices in administration programs without offering positive programs of their own to the working class.



--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached by e-mail at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.