The Swedes have not just created a society of perpetual liberal-arts students, although those seminars are available too. Swedish adult education is also about jobs. Today, special training courses run from one week for an introduction to desktop publishing to 28 weeks for business economics. The courses are offered at 100 government-funded centers nationwide. Waldemar Sandberg attends one in Stockholm, the AMU Center on Katarinavagen. At 52, he’s a casualty of Europe’s deepening recession. But he’s not too worried yet. The government is paying the full tuition about $12,600 for 28 weeks-so Sandberg can learn modern accounting and comer skills. The government also pays Sandberg and the 599 others in his program a respectable wage-$400 a week in Sandberg’s case. He hopes the training will help him land a job as finance director of a Swedish company in Europe’s newly integrated markets. “It’s a cost for the government, but it’s also an investment for society,” he says. “If you make a total calculation perhaps [the government] will even make a profit.”
The Swedes insist they aren’t throwing money at a problem, merely making a shrewd choice about how to spend limited funds. The country stints on cash benefits for the unemployed, doling out just.84 percent of GNP for the purpose. But Sweden lavishes money on training programs and grants for trainees, spending 2.07 percent of GNP (four times the rate at which the United States spends). “We recognize we have to take care of people in our society. But they may as well do something useful,” says Berit Rollen, director of Sweden’s National Employment Training Board.
Critics argue that Sweden’s emphasis on training amounts to a giant statistical shell game. People in training programs aren’t counted as unemployed even though they have no jobs. “Sometimes these programs just tie people up and have the effect of keeping them away from real jobs,” says Swedish economist Gunnar Eliasson. But the best defense of the program may be the fact that it works. Historically, 70 percent of trainees have found work within six months of finishing their studies. That’s a convincing argument for the new conservative Swedish government, which swept the Social Democrats out of power two months ago for only the third time in 59 years. The conservatives have attacked other parts of the country’s cradle-to-grave social-welfare system, but have pledged to outspend the Social Democrats on job training. What better way to make good capitalists, after all, than training the able-bodied to do useful work?
