The purpose of this thesis is to investigate Sweden’s ability to adopt positive actions based on gender and ethnicity into national legislation, in regard to EU regulations. The possibility to use positive actions is established at an EU level by both treaties and directives. EU-case law narrows the practical use of the measure. Sweden has chosen to implement positive action based on gender but not ethnicity in their national legislation, despite the fact that the allowed extent to use it would have been the same. The purpose is further to gain a deeper understanding of the problems, as well as the beneficiary effects, that positive actions based on ethnicity could lead to. The thesis applies a combination of both legal method and sociology of law perspectives. Intersectional perspectives have been applied in the thesis to obtain further knowledge about the structural discrimination of ethnic minorities in Sweden. The thesis includes an investigation of the legal grounds of positive actions based on gender to enable comparisons but the main focus will be on positive actions based on ethnicity. The Swedish discussion on positive action based on ethnicity is mainly focusing on the problem of compiling statistics on people’s ethnicity, which may be a necessary consequence of the measure to achieve explicitness. The most obvious benefit with positive action based on ethnicity is that it aims to improve the situation on the labor market of disadvantaged groups. People with foreign ethnical backgrounds are systematically discriminated in the Swedish society and since Sweden currently is facing a great migratory movement, the need for measures against systematic discrimination grows. Dividing the population into different categories can lead to segregation rather than integration on the labor market. The problem arises when the will to create opportunities for foreigners contradicts the Swedish fear of categorizing people. Possible solutions with perhaps more long-term outcomes could be to increase employers awareness of the positive economic effects of diversity in the workforce and also to increase awareness among the Swedish population about the systematic discrimination of foreigners to change social norms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-51450 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Ilestedt, Evelina |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för ekonomistyrning och logistik (ELO) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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