Working life from different perspectives

”The problems bring us together, but we have different angles of approach. To a certain extent, this can lead to concrete collaborations between e.g., political scientists and economists, but the principle aim is to build contacts and enrich one another in the long-term,” explains Director Bertil Holmlund, who is a professor of economics.

The economists in Uppsala have for many years researched into the labour market. It is also an expanding field in political science. Uppsala is also home to IFAU, the Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.

”This is an unusually strong research environment, both nationally and internationally. Today, 40-50 researchers are associated with the centre. We have a good reputation and numerous international contacts,” says Bertil Holmlund.

”The many registers in Sweden are a great competitive advantage. It's only in the Nordic countries that we have access to such a large bank of statistics. This makes us interesting as partners,” says Per-Anders Edin, Professor of Economics and Vice-Director.

Sometimes the researchers obtain controversial results, when for example they examine the link between social insurance and occupation and the consequences that the education policy and family policy have on the wage packet.

What happens when reality does not correspond to the political rhetoric?

”Generally, it tends to even out. Sometimes the research findings end up on the right, sometimes on the left, politically speaking,” says Bertil Holmlund.

”When we could show that the Swedish free school reform improved pupils' performance, it was controversial. But it's not certain that the results will survive for the next study, because we don't know if they are robust results. You often need to follow up with other methods and statistical data.”

One thing is certain: there is a lot going on at present on the Swedish labour market. Bertil Holmlund and Per-Anders Edin are following with interest all labour market reforms of recent years.

”They're interesting for the research, but we might need to wait a while before we can investigate the effects of such reforms,” Per-Anders Edin suggests.

FACTS

Uppsala Centre for Labour Studies is a 'FAS centre' with funding from FAS (Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research). It was founded in 2010 and has funding for five years.
There are three main areas dealt with here:

• labour market relations
• unemployment and social security
• income, education and schooling