I love this reply because it showcases how people hear so selectively and ignore facts. I guess relying on fiction is much easier.
Anyhow, I agree. Seems like the laws are actually working as intended as I have started to outsource to Asia. Your laws did wonders to protect the workers which they were "intended to help". Man this is way to fucking hilarious and sad at the same time.
Your <rant> is basically about you not having (or not willing to budget) enough money to cover the extra risk that the Sweden's work laws impose on your startup. When you think about it like this, the laws and your response to them work exactly as intended.
From Sweden's point of view, the positions you have outsourced will be covered by a company which is willing to pay the price of access to the labor market in Sweden. Which is not unlike a tax.
Did you budget for Sweden's taxes in your startup? Not doing that and then posting a <rant> that you suddenly have to pay taxes and that the existence of the tax code forces you to outsource to Asia would be quite similar to your post here.
People who start new companies don't automatically have infinite amount of money. Or you think that if one is not insanely rich one has no right to start any business?
This is so cynical to support regulation of small starting up companies and huge international corporations by the same laws, ignoring the scale. Only 1 company of 100 actually survive to become profitable. No wonder corporatism "wins" around the world. Though usually it's ignorance, in case of Sweden what they do to small business seems to be done intentionally.
No system is perfect, and sometimes we need to acknowledge that unsavory unintended consequences do exist.
I recently went to a european country with similar laws and was talking to an american ex-pat woman running the tour I signed up for. She said when she first decided to stay a while in this country and started looking for jobs, people were asking her strangely personal questions like how serious she was with her boyfriend. Only after she took her maternity leave a few years later did she realize they were actually gauging how big a maternity leave risk she was going to be while not quite asking her that outright because that would be technically illegal.
The kicker is now she was running her own small tourist business, and she flat out said that she would think long and hard about hiring a woman in her 20's for the exact same reason. In this country she would have to pay a person taking maternity leave out of pocket for up to a year and the government would reimburse her a year or two after the person comes back. The issue was that for a small 3-4 person operation, losing a person for a year while paying whatever % of salary is a significant risk to the business -- she wasn't sure she could stay afloat while waiting for the government to reimburse her (plus this was a mediteranean government not known for german levels of solvency...)
None of this is to say any of this is right or just, but it's just a first-hand tourist story I got that shows it's difficult to create a system that works (at least if "works" is defined solely as "maximizing business growth"). Even if something is formally illegal doesn't mean it doesn't appear as some of the informal mental calculus, and an honest discussion about this would say "yes, these policies can impact business growth and have unintended consequences." The followup conversation no one in the US is willing to have, though, is should we really be fetishizing business growth above all else?
Anyhow, I agree. Seems like the laws are actually working as intended as I have started to outsource to Asia. Your laws did wonders to protect the workers which they were "intended to help". Man this is way to fucking hilarious and sad at the same time.