Another report...

Another report on the status of labour market integration in Sweden has been published, and I watched the seminar. The affair left me less than impressed, and apparently I'm not alone.

I have a range of questions and observations, with all due respect to the two authors who did a fairly good job of summarizing the state of the art:

1) Summarizing the state of the art reveals that the art still hasn't moved beyond the problem formulation stage. In other words, the Swedish discourse is standing pretty much in the same place as it did in 1996 when Björn Rosengren's Crown Commission report was published -  the observed problems were the same. It's quite remarkable that the labour market segregation hasn't budged at all in 20 years.

2) The researchers presented a graph showing labour market developed. It only contained three indicators - being full time unemployed, having at some point had some form of employment, or having left the pool of statistics (death or emigration). My question is: why is there an assumptionthat getting any type of job, for any type of timeperiod, considered an indicator of success in the labour market?

Think about the logic of this, now. A person who has a Ph.D. degree and manages to land a job as a janitor for about a month and then falls back into unemployment is, according to this rationale, considered succesfully integrated in the labour market. A better indicator would be "has full time employment at the own level of competence". I think one reason the authors didn't use that definition, though, is that Swedish labour market statistics simply lacks data on this. The Employment Service doesn't measure. Thus the degree of under-employment in the country remains quite inadequately explored. This reflects the poverty of the Swedish measurement tools, and the fact that nobody has even reflected on this in the public debate is quite alarming, frankly.

3) The authors do mention that discrimination "exists", but the studying the labour market in terms of the ethnic hierarchy that I recall as quite entrenched was not done. All the studies that I took part of between 1996 and 2005 showed very clearly that an ethnic hierarchy existed on the labour market, where racialized minorities, and Africans in particular, were persistently on the bottom of the ladder. But this huge indicator of discrimination seems to have been forgotten in the public discourse since 2005.

In the UK and Canada, there is a continuous effort to track the socio-economic status of "visible minorities", which isn't the best category conceivable, but at least it captures an important dimension of the problem. The Swedish public debate seems incapable of handling this parameter, and the appeals to stop talking about ethnicity will likely simply result on obfuscating this very serious problem, but hardly make it go away. Again, an indicator of the lack of sophistication in the measurement toolbox. In the post-presentation debate, Nima Senandaji touched upon this briefly, but it was not explored by the panel at all.

4) The authors state that the tools for succeeding at labour market integration exist, and see no real reason to make any major changes to the toolset (i.e. the public agencies). This is probably based on the considerable amounts that are, traditionally, assigned to an active labour market policy, and SFI (Swedish For Immigrants). But look at the amounts spent for labour market policy. Do we know if the Employment Service is a competent public agency that actually succesfully assist any unemployed person to jobs, immigrant or not? All the audits I have seen says the exact opposite, and the substantial critique levied against SFI during the past decade seems to have been unaddressed entirely. Is this because macroeconomists, concerned mostly macro-scale statistics, simply have left issues of organizational theory oustide the study? And why would you do that? There is little public management literature that would support such complacency.

What's really interesting is that the authors themselves seem to acknowledge that they actually do not know how the implementation of the existing policies work (did they miss all those audits? How?), but if so, how can they be so sure that we should feel confident that no major reforms of the toolsets are needed? Spending levels alone are very poor indicators of outcomes, and the outcomes - 20 years of clear and present labour market segregation, leave little reason to feel confident about this.

5) The authors argued in favour of better validation of foreign credentials. It's interesting, because it is a problem in other countries as well, including Canada. Only, here, the discussion concerns credential recognition, which is a slightly different, and more precise, perspective. I.e. it's about recognizing foreign experience, not validating it. The authors' suggested solution is a classic Swedish one - institute another public agency to do the work. Given that huge sums have already been invested in "systems" like that, I'm not sure why we should feel confident that another hierarchical and bureaucratic solution would work this time.

Besides, an important part of the problem is likely to be recruitment procedures, so maybe it would be better to raise the awareness among employers about how to make sure that recruitment procedures identify relevant competencies and do not discriminate people with foreign experience. There's a host of such methods to employ from other countries, and this was a topic discussed extensively in the early 00s, but for some reason it's been forgotten now.

6) The authors argue that more "experiments" are need to develop best practices. This is rather remarkable, since experiments and method development have been done for the past 15 years, funded by the EU through the European Social Fund. This is both for labour market policy practices in general, but a certain amount has always been devoted to immigrants as a special target group. If the authors are unaware of these experiments (I'm going to have to assume that this is the case), then why have these efforts passed into oblivion? Where are the reports? Who reads them? Hundreds of projects have been started up and finished. Have any been succesful (I know some have, though most might not have been). Why has the knowledge transfer been so poorly done that these experiments haven't even made a dent in the public discourse for a decade and a half?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and hypothesize that the reason is simple: the Employment Service is the biggest single national adminstration in the country. It has a huge budget, and obviously a vested interest in keeping keeping the status quo. The well-being of the clients is, most likely, a very secondary concern in that context. And that leads me to the next question:

7) Why are there no practitioners present at the seminar? No frontline civil servants or client representatives were present. There is, seemingly, no connection between the macro-scale economics and the experiences of the people who are outside the labour market, the very people these statistics are supposed to represent, and that will likely affect not only how the problem is formulated, but the ability present solutions that actually address client needs adequately. To do that, the clients of these interventions would need to have power to at least make their voices heard, or even better, the capacity to influence the agenda. That still doesn't exist in the Swedish debate.

The host asked if the consensus of the room reflected the consensus of the public discourse or simply reflected the panel being skewed. The answer, in my opinion, is: both. It does reflect the current state of the Swedish public discourse, and that public discourse is quite skewed, dominated by the perspective of macroeconomists (sociologists need not apply, it seems, and there is currently a grand total of one political scientist who make repeated appearances in the public spotlight). In short, it seems to me that it suffers from a high degree of tunnelvision which incapacitates it, stalls it, makes it incapable of moving forward or absorbing impulses from outside, and given how often speakers repeated that things are not very alarming, the reaction to this seems to be one dominated by complacency. That's both quite frustrating and quite alarming.