MALMÖ, SWEDEN: Swedish Human Rights Conference (Nov 16)

MALMÖ, SWEDEN: Swedish Human Rights Conference (Nov 16)

BIEN co-founder and honorary co-president Guy Standing will be speaking about basic income as a human right at the Swedish Forum for Human Rights, which will be held in Malmö on November 16.

The Swedish Forum for Human Rights is Scandinavia’s largest annual forum about human rights–drawing over 2,000 attendees from schools, universities, businesses, government offices, non-governmental organizations, and more.

The forum was created in 2000, when a coalition of groups–the association Ordfront, the Academy of Democracy, the Foundation for Human Rights, the Stockholm School of Theology, and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs–decided to create a space in which to connect research and practice in fields related to human rights. Since 2004, the Swedish Forum for Human Rights has convened annually in November, with the location alternating between Stockholm and another Swedish city.

The theme of the 2016 forum is “It’s about your rights!”

We all share the same human rights but what are these rights and what do they entail? In what way does this affect you in everyday life? How do you gain knowledge about your rights? Today, the state’s obligation to uphold human right is often lacking and civil society and activists have to assume responsibility. How does this affect people’s opportunity to obtain their rights and what happens to the accountability? During a time when so many are seeking refuge, the right to asylum risks being threatened. How can it be protected?

For more information about the event, including a complete list of speakers, see: https://www.mrdagarna.nu/en/.


Reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı

Photo: “Stockhom Uni subway” CC BY 2.0 Wrote

MALMÖ, SWEDEN: Guy Standing to Speak at The Conference, Aug 17-18

MALMÖ, SWEDEN: Guy Standing to Speak at The Conference, Aug 17-18

BIEN Co-founder Guy Standing, Research Professor at SOAS, University of London, will be speaking at two events at a conference aptly named “The Conference”. Organized by Media Evolution, a cluster of media companies in southern Sweden, The Conference will bring together 40 speakers to educate its 1,000 participants about a variety of topics relevant to the new digital world. This not-for-profit event will be held in Malmö from August 16-17, with various “side events” taking place nearby from August 15-19.

On Wednesday, August 17, Standing will participate in a session titled “Humans, Labour, and Technology” — concerning disruptions of work and the economy due to digital technologies. According to his conference page, Standing will speak about “why rentiers thrive and work does not pay,” “the coming precariat revolt,” and “why a basic income is essential.”

For this session, Standing will be joined by Sha Hwang, the co-founder of Nava, a team of designers and developers that initially formed as a part of efforts to fix HealthCare.gov. While Standing will talk about the growing precariat class, Sha will discuss the motivations and responsibilities of the tech industry and government.

On Thursday, August 18, Standing will take part in a side event on technology and migration. Other speakers at this side event include Dragana Kaurin, an ethnographer and human rights researcher, and entrepreneur Hampus Jakobsson.

According to the description, the Thursday event is set in the “most cozy courtyard in the world” (at Hedmanska gården), and it will begin about an hour after the skinny dipping event at the cold bathing house Ribersborgs Kallbadhus (pictured).

Other presentation topics at The Conference range from online harassment to the communication strategies of extremist groups to the future of food.

The Conference is sold out. Registration is still open to some of the side events (including, at the time of writing, the skinny dipping).


Photo CC Xuanxu 

Thanks, as always, to my supporters on Patreon!

SWEDEN: Basic income taken seriously but media remains skeptical

A Swedish Green Party motion to investigate basic income policy options has injected new life into the UBI debate in Sweden. Several established commentators are finally engaging with the issue after a long period of ignoring or instantly dismissing the idea.

The Greens called for an inquiry into the effects of introducing a basic income at their party conference over the summer which predictably – given the political climate in Sweden – attracted much knee-jerk ridicule.

Swedish public intellectual Roland Paulsen

Swedish public intellectual Roland Paulsen

However, recently several heavy-hitting publications have run opinion pieces on the issue even if most are negative.

The debate has clearly been spurred on by additional factors such as moves towards basic income in neighboring Finland. There has also been tireless campaign work carried out by Swedish grassroots civil society groups and media advocacy by a number of public intellectuals, notably Roland Paulsen.

Well-established evening newspaper Expressen, a popular centre-right publication, this month ran an in-depth pro-UBI essay by Malin Ekman arguing that “a basic income for all” is far more realistic than “jobs for all” in tomorrow’s digital economy. The paper’s main national politics commentator has in the past dismissed the Greens’ basic income proposal as “immature” without further comment.

The moderate-conservative broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet earlier ran an in-depth essay by the center-right Center Party’s chief economist who called the implications of the basic income proposal “devastating for the economy and the environment” and said it reflected the Greens’ supposed “muzzy and unworldly” approach to politics.

The left-leaning cultural magazine Arena has also attacked basic income with an opinion piece by a macroeconomist saying UBI supporters were keeping silent about Sweden’s major refugee crisis because they knew their policy would only make the situation more difficult.

The nascent debate is taking place in a context where the prime minister’s Social Democratic Party remains wedded to its traditional active labor market approach, and a mix of demand-led and supply-side economic policies, to combat unemployment. The center-left government, which includes the Green Party, has set a goal of reducing unemployment to five percent by 2020, a target that has been widely condemned as unrealistic.

 

Further reading in SWEDISH:

Malin Ekman, “Medborgarlön allt mer realistiskt instrument” [Citizen’s income getting increasingly realistic as a policy] Expressen, 2 November 2015

Karl-Gösta Bergström, “Miljöpartiets fem omogna beslut” [Five immature decisions by the Green Party], Expressen, 14 June 2015

Roland Paulsen, “Att straffa de arbetslösa är en grymhet av historiska mått” [Punishing the unemployed is an injustice of historical proportions] Dagens Nyheter, 15 July 2015

Martin Ådahl, “Medborgarlön är dåligt för miljön” [Citizen’s income is bad for the environment] Svenska Dagbladet, 7 October 2015

Anders Bergh, “Därför tror ingen på basinkomst” [Here’s why no-one believes in basic income] Dagens Arena, 2 November 2015

Åsa Lundqvist, Family Policy Paradoxes: Gender equality and labour market regulation in Sweden

Åsa Lundqvist, Family Policy Paradoxes: Gender equality and labour market regulation in Sweden, 1930-2010, Policy Press, 2011, viii + 155 pp, hbk, 1 847 42455 6, £65

The Nordic countries provide generous gender-neutral parental leave and benefits and also publicly-funded childcare, and the result is an unusual combination of high fertility and high female labour market participation. This book is a detailed study of family policy in Sweden, particularly in relation to two paradoxes: that policy promotes both mothers as carers in the home and as workers in the labour market, and that men and women are regarded as both different and equal.

The book is a study of how Swedish social policy relating to the family has arrived at its present state and of more recent developments which have been driven in different directions by a greater individualisation in society (and thus defamiliarisation) and an understanding of women as disadvantaged within the family. Most recently, a reintroduction of a benefit for carers at home, and the introduction of labour market incentives for women, have exacerbated the paradoxicality of the situation.

As the concluding section of the book suggests, the fundamental paradox is between equality and freedom of choice. We might put it like this: How to preserve radical gender freedom in the face of government policies aimed at equality in the labour market? And how to preserve gender equality in the face of government legislation designed to give to carers freedom over how they organise their households and their labour market participation? These are vital questions for any government, and are thus an essential field of debate for anyone promoting debate on social policy reform.

This is a well-researched and thought-provoking book.