Towards the Swedish Model

We might be moving, in one aspect at least, towards something like the Swedish Model in the structure of employment in this country.

The picture that emerges when the employment patterns of female workers are scrutinised is especially stark. According to the Office for National Statistics’ Annual Business Inquiry, of the 1.07m additional jobs taken by women between 1998 and 2006, 963,000 were in the sectors where the public sector predominates or is almost the sole purchaser of services, such as health, education, social care and public administration.

The number of jobs held by women in purely private sector parts of the economy has actually fallen in the West Midlands and the East Midlands, with negligible growth in Scotland, East Anglia, Yorkshire and Humberside, the south-east and the north-west.

In contrast, private sector employment has been more important in underpinning economic expansion and household incomes for male workers and also in two regions: Wales and the south-west.

The growth of employment in parts of the economy dominated by the public sector was high at 25 per cent, between 1998 and 2006, the latest year for which data is available. But it is clear that the majority of the new jobs for which men were hired were still in private sector parts of the economy.

That's an interesting piece of number crunching from the Financial Times there. One possible reason given is that only the public sector is accomodating enough to women workers wanting part time work because of child care commitments (and possibly also extensive maternity benefits). Another way of saying the same thing is that private sector employers consider the same benefits to be too expensive to be worth offering.

But what this does mean is that we're moving closer to something like the Swedish model of the labour market. There, 75% of men work in the private sector and 75% of women in the public.

Which leads me to a possibly subversive thought. Instead of all the men producing real value which can be taxed so that all the women can work in education, caring services and so on, why not simply cut out the middle man of government? The men carry on doing all of that work creating economic value and out of that they pay their wives, daughters and mothers to do the necessary education and caring? The only people who lose here are the bureaucrats administering the payment system and really, who cares about them?