Volvo Cars plans 2,000 job cuts in Sweden
Volvo Cars plans to cut staff by 2,500 people, of whom 2,000 are in Sweden, as it seeks to save 5 billion kronor a year to improve profitability, the company said in an announcement on Friday.
The job reductions will be achieved by cancelling agreements with consultants, not replacing those who retire, and making redundancies.
"The important thing to point out here is that this is going to be done through voluntary redundancies and through being extremely restrictive about new hires, although we're not going to go into exactly how the mix will look," the company's finance director, Fredrik Hansson, told TT.
He said the majority of job reductions would be in the Gothenburg area, and that they would involve white collar workers rather than production workers.
Over the last three months, the company has posted an operating loss of 5.6 billion kronor, down from a profit of 6.4 billion in the same period last year.
Swedish vocabulary: frivilliga avgångar – voluntary departures
Red-Green Parties vote down SD push to increase prison sentences sooner
The Social Democrats, Green Party, Centre Party and Left Party have joined together to vote down a proposal to bring in a package increasing prison sentences in 2029, on the grounds that Sweden's prison service has said that it needs at least five years to prepare for the change.
The far-right Sweden Democrats had proposed that the government decide that those parts of the sentence reform package which have not yet been given an implementation date be brought into force in 2029.
"We need five years from the time when a decision is made to implement the policy to be able to handle the increase [in prison places]," said Rikard Jermsten, general director for the Swedish Prison and Probation Service, when called into the parliament's Justice Committee to advise MPs.
Swedish vocabulary: en ökning – an increase
Left Party MP aims to keep his seat, saying he has not been charged for election fraud
Left Party MP Mohamed Ali has said he intends to keep his place in Sweden's parliament, despite the police investigation into election fraud in Dalarna, the region for which he was elected, telling the TT newswire that he, himself, is not under suspicion.
“I have not been formally notified [of any suspicions] and therefore I intend to keep my seat in parliament,” he says. "I have campaigned and been to various municipalities in Dalarna. I have talked to people, knocked on doors and met lots of people; that is how I have attracted lots of votes."
On Tuesday, it emerged that three people are under investigation for election fraud in Dalarna, with the activities connected to Ali's personal vote campaign.
The Expressen newspaper has reported that Ali is currently the only MP with debts at Sweden's national bailiff's office.
Swedish vocabulary: att behålla – to keep/retain
Sweden's centre-left parties have reached an agreement on how to draft an emergency law halting so-called "teenage deportations".
"This is a clear message about where we want to draw the line," the TT newswire quoted Niels Paarup-Petersen, the Centre Party's spokesperson on migration policy, as saying, following a meeting of parliament's social insurance committee, which handles immigration matters, on Thursday.
The halt on deportations is intended to apply to individuals who previously lived in Sweden legally alongside their families and still maintain family ties to Sweden, but who received a rejection on their residence permit application on or after July 20th, 2021. It will not apply to people who have gone into hiding or avoided contact with the authorities. Applicants will also be required to have an ongoing family connection in Sweden.
The legislation will not block deportation orders issued on the grounds of criminal offences or national security, nor will it cover individuals who have been formally found to lead an unrespectable or dishonest lifestyle.
Those covered by the emergency law will be granted a 13-month temporary residence permit.
However, it remains unclear whether the Swedish Migration Agency will temporarily pause deportations while waiting for the legislation to take effect.
During the previous parliamentary term, the agency paused the execution of deportation orders for a specific group of young adults when new legislation was announced.
"There are no regulations dictating that a director-general must act in a specific way; it was purely out of a sense of goodwill that I made the decision to hold off last time. So now we will have to consider how to handle things this time around," Maria Mindhammar, director-general of the Migration Agency, told TT.
Swedish vocabulary: av ren välvilja – purely out of a sense of goodwill
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