Published: 17 Sep 12 11:53 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/43274/20120917/
The government wants to alter Sweden's system of parental leave benefits in an effort to get more immigrant women into the workforce.
External link: Fact sheet on Sweden's parental leave benefits »
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What we have here is a government failure of understanding economic incentives. If you give people more pay for child leave, how will that incentivize them to go into the labor force when they make more money having kids than if they were working a job?
A much bigger problem is the ceiling for people who already have jobs and would like to have children. Since you're sacrificing a large amount of your income and will probably not be able to pay your bills, you either don't have children or postpone it to an age where the odds of birth defects are way higher.
It is already very hard these days to get into a social situation where it's a sensible thing to have children. Provided you want them to grow up in a safe and normal environment with maximum success of properly integrating in society at an older age.
These suggested changes do not encourage immigrant women to get jobs, it encourages immigrants to have more children. While the same rules are essentially discouraging the native population from having children in the first place. I think the government should be more concerned with the latter as that will eventually benefit everyone a lot more.
What on earth are you talking about? You think that getting 80% of your salary for staying home with your baby is "sacrificing a large amount of your salary"? The amounts of 180/225kr discussed in this article only relate to the sums that are paid to those who have not worked or earned more that 225kr for each day in the 240 days prior to the birth. If you have worked then the max you get is over 900kr/day or a max income of around 27,000kr/month for a whole year. Ovbiously this does not cover whole salary of a high income earner but most people plan ahead. The amounts paid in Sweden are very generous compared to other countries.
@ bourgeoisieboheme
This amount is not just paid to immigrants but to all people in Sweden who have not worked. The problem is that the previous amountof max 5400kr/month was too low to actually live on so for example students who found themselves accidently pregnant found that they got only 2/3 of the student grant level.
The way that they are encouraging work is by limiting the number of days - previously you could arrive as an immigrant with a 5 year old and 6 year old and claim 2x480 days whereas of course most Swedes are forced to take the bulk of their days in year 1 owing to the lack of childcare for children under 1 - now for children over 4 on arrival in Sweden will only get 95 days