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2009/02/24
Emergency Employment Countermeasures Headquarters Held a Briefing About Sweden's Employment Policies
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On the evening of February 24, the DPJ Committee on Emergency Employment Countermeasures Headquarters (Chair: DPJ Acting President Naoto Kan) held its 11th meeting in the Diet, where it held a briefing by Mr. Hiroshi Nishino, an expert on Sweden's employment policies and reconfirmed the DPJ's plan for job creation.
At the start of the meeting, Ritsuo Hosokawa, the Secretary-General of the Countermeasures Headquarters, greeted the participants and said, "Today, we will learn from Mr. Nishino about the employment policies in Sweden, a country that is said to be an advanced nation as regards employment issues."
Mr. Nishino began the briefing by pointing out that a hundred years ago Sweden was one of Europe's poorest nations. Then, he explained plainly that Sweden, in order to establish industries with competitive power in the international scene, concentrates its efforts in education, including vocational training. He added that Sweden's education is entirely cost-free and assigns particular prominence to pre-school education, and that the country maintains a wage policy of solidarity (workers who does the same kind of work are to be paid the same wages) and adopts various policies to make every person (including persons with disabilities and immigrants) an element of the workforce.
Mr. Nishino also talked about Sweden's political system and explained that it is purely a nation based on regional sovereignty, with a low cost administration (the central government has 2,500 employees) and with a single chamber parliamentary system based on a proportional representation electoral system. He explained that elections campaigns in Sweden are primarily based on policies and that a political career is not considered to be an occupation.
Mr. Nishino went on to enumerate several perspectives that he offered for policies in Japan, such that Japan should not limit itself to lamenting that "the only resource that Japan has is its people", but instead should focus on measures to educate its human resources which, in turn, will affect society. He also said that Japan could stipulate free tuition and seek a human based capitalism (construct a learning society) and create the conditions where individuals can, as long as they wish, continue their education at any stage of life. He added that the conversion to a knowledge-based society would only come from the establishment of a life-time learning society and that Japan should break away from its current system where the lifetime occupation of a person is decided at age 18.
After the briefing, the participants discussed the interim report on the DPJ's job creation plan and future actions programs.
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