Labour Market Reform in Germany and Sweden

Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Politics - Political systems in general and in comparison, grade: 2,0, Vaxjo University (School for Social Sciences), course: Swedish Politics, language: English, abstract: Public discourse around the topic of unemployment in Germany affects more people than ever. It is one of the top ten topics that receive permanent coverage by public and private news media. Several most recent surveys have shown that a large share of the German labour force is afraid of losing their jobs. Worse than that, the scandalous discovery of faulty placement statistics published by the German Federal Labour Office ( Bundesanstalt fur Arbeit , a federal body in charge of administrating unemployment in Germany), palliating its successes on placement of unemployed people, caused serious political damage and lead to public mistrust in the federal government s (comprised of social democrats and greens) competences in labour market policies in early February 2002. Often, European countries such as the Netherlands, the UK and the Nordic countries are referred to when analysing strategies on how to cope with unemployment in Germany. This essay shall provide a brief overview over and a comparison of labour market policies and their reforms developed and applied in the past two to six years in Germany and Sweden.