Alt Binaries

The Scandinavian countries that American progressives hold up as models of socialist paradise make it easier to fire people than the United States does. And the French labor movement spent a century building the strongest worker protections in Europe, and the result is that if you’re twenty-three and French, there’s a decent chance you can’t get a job. Both of these facts are true. Neither side likes to talk about the other’s.

One approach says: the good life comes from the job. Make the job good. Protect workers from arbitrary firing, mandate benefits, give unions real power over working conditions, regulate hours, enforce seniority. If you get a job, that job should be a place where you have dignity and stability and a say in what happens to you. This is the Labor Left, and its logic is old and intuitive: the workplace is where power is exercised over workers, so the workplace is where you fight. France does this. Southern Europe does this. The American labor movement, when it dreams, dreams of this.

The other approach says something genuinely different, and it’s weirder than people usually give it credit for. It says: let the market be ruthless. Let companies hire and fire freely. Let unprofitable firms die. Don’t try to make the job itself into a source of security, because jobs are temporary and markets are volatile and pretending otherwise just freezes the economy in place.

Instead, tax the enormous wealth that a dynamic market produces and use it to build a society so comprehensively generous that losing your job is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe. Universal healthcare, free education, subsidized childcare, unemployment benefits that replace most of your income, retraining programs that actually work. This is the Swedish Style, and the important thing about it is that it isn’t really about the worker as a worker. It’s about the citizen as a citizen.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. The Labor Left is trying to make the experience of working better. The Swedish Style is trying to make the experience of living better, and it’s willing to let the experience of working be worse (more precarious, less protected, subject to the full volatility of the market) in order to fund that broader project. These are not two versions of the same goal. They are two different goals that happen to both benefit people who work for a living.

(I want to pause here and note that both of these are left-wing positions. This is not a left-versus-right debate. This is a fight between two groups of people who both get mad at the same newspaper editorials. That’s what makes it interesting, and also what makes it so vicious when it surfaces.)

The philosophical core is a question about where security lives. Does it live in the job? Or does it live in the society? The Rehn-Meidner model, which basically designed Swedish postwar economics, used an explicit metaphor for this: “security by wings” rather than “security under shells.” If the society catches you when you fall, you don’t need the job to be a fortress. If the society doesn’t catch you, the fortress is all you’ve got.

And this is where it gets uncomfortable for the Swedish Style, because the thing about wings is that someone else has to keep them in good repair. The fortress is yours. The wings belong to the state. And states can change their minds. Sweden discovered this the hard way in the 1990s, when a financial crisis led to austerity, benefit cuts, and a political realignment that hasn’t fully resolved. When the trampoline tears, you don’t just lose a program. You lose the entire theory of how your society works.

You don’t have to pick one forever. But you should notice which one you instinctively reach for, because that instinct is telling you something about what you think people are, what you think safety means, and whether you trust the society you live in enough to let it hold you up.

There’s also a version of this argument where the American left tries to have both: strengthen unions *and* build a Scandinavian welfare state. This is popular because it lets you avoid the uncomfortable trade-off. It’s also potentially incoherent, because the fortress’s labor market rigidity (hard to fire, hard to restructure, hard to let unproductive firms die) undermines the engine that the welfare state needs to tax. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Imagine you run a small company and one of your employees isn’t working out. Not maliciously, not negligently, just: the role changed, or their skills didn’t keep up, or the department needs to shrink. In the United States, you fire them. Maybe you give them two weeks’ severance if you’re feeling generous. They file for unemployment, which replaces maybe a third of their income for six months, and everyone wishes each other well and pretends it’s fine.

In France, you begin a process. You document the underperformance. You consult with the works council. You offer retraining. If you eventually proceed with the termination, you may owe months of severance, and if the employee contests the firing, a labor court may reinstate them. The entire ordeal can take over a year. During which time the employee is still showing up, still being paid, and everyone knows the situation is untenable, but the legal machinery grinds at its own pace.

In Denmark, you fire them on a Thursday. On Friday they’re at the unemployment office, where they start receiving benefits that replace up to ninety percent of their previous income. By Monday they’re enrolled in a retraining program. The government spends more on active labor market programs per capita than any other country in the OECD. The fired employee doesn’t love being fired, obviously, but they’re not in financial crisis, they’re not in legal limbo, and they’re not clinging to a job that no longer wants them.

These three scenarios represent three different theories of how to organize a society, and the interesting fight is between the second and the third. The first (the American model) is a kind of baseline that almost everyone on the left agrees is inadequate. The real debate is between people who want to make the job itself into a source of security and people who want to make the society into a source of security, freeing the job to be just a job.

This is a bigger difference than it sounds.

The Labor Left position, if you take it seriously, is that work is not just an economic transaction. It’s a relationship. You spend most of your waking life at your job. Your coworkers are your community. Your skill at your specific role is your identity. The workplace is where power is exercised over you most directly, and so the workplace is where protections need to be strongest. Making it hard to fire you isn’t just about income continuity. It’s about preserving the fabric of your life. A steelworker who gets retrained as a healthcare aide has not been made whole. Something real was destroyed.

This logic produces strong labor protections, powerful unions, rigid employment law, and a dense web of regulations around working conditions. If you are inside this system and have a permanent job, your experience as a worker is genuinely good. You have stability, predictability, a voice in your workplace, protection from the arbitrary exercise of managerial power. The Labor Left is, on its own terms, correct that this is better for the worker who has it.

The problem (and the Labor Left’s critics will not let you forget this) is the phrase “who has it.” Strong labor protections create a two-tier labor market. Permanent workers are protected. Everyone else (young people, immigrants, people trying to re-enter the workforce after an absence) faces a wall. Employers who know it’s difficult and expensive to fire someone become cautious about hiring anyone in the first place. They use temporary contracts, they hire through agencies, they automate. Youth unemployment in Southern Europe has been catastrophic for extended periods, and while there are many contributing factors, the rigidity of the labor market is consistently cited as one of them.

The Swedish Style starts from a completely different premise. It says: don’t try to make the job the source of security, because that approach will always protect insiders at the expense of outsiders. Instead, let the labor market be flexible (even ruthless), and then tax the wealth that a dynamic economy produces to fund a welfare state so comprehensive that the distinction between “employed” and “unemployed” becomes, for purposes of daily life, a matter of inconvenience rather than disaster.

This is a genuinely radical idea, and it’s worth sitting with how radical it is. The Swedish Style does not try to make the experience of working better. A Danish employer can fire you more easily than an American one can. Swedish workers in the mid-twentieth century explicitly accepted wage compression (earning less than their productivity warranted at profitable firms) as part of a national economic strategy. The experience of being a worker, qua worker, is in many ways less comfortable in the Nordic model than in the Labor Left model.

What’s better is everything else. Healthcare that doesn’t depend on your job. Childcare that lets you work in the first place. Parental leave that doesn’t force you to choose between your career and your family. Retirement security that isn’t tied to a specific employer’s pension fund. Education that is free at every level.

The Swedish Style’s argument is that if you make the society good enough, the job doesn’t need to be a fortress, because losing it doesn’t mean losing your access to the basic infrastructure of a decent life.

Imagine two workers, both of whom just lost their jobs. One is in Lyon, one is in Copenhagen. The Lyon worker has a strong legal case against her former employer and may get reinstated or receive substantial severance. But the process will take months, during which she’s in limbo, and if she doesn’t get reinstated, she enters a labor market where permanent positions are scarce and the stigma of unemployment is real.

The Copenhagen worker has no legal claim on her former job. It’s gone. But she’s receiving benefits that replace most of her income, she’s enrolled in a retraining program by the end of the week, and the labor market she’s entering is fluid enough that employers aren’t afraid to hire her because they know they can adjust later if they need to.

Which worker is better off? The honest answer is that it depends on what you mean by “better off.”

The Lyon worker had a better experience as an employee. The Copenhagen worker is having a better experience as a person who lost her job. The Labor Left optimized for the first thing. The Swedish Style optimized for the second. And neither is wrong about what they’re optimizing for.

There is a geeky historical example that illuminates why these two approaches are so hard to combine. In the 1950s, two Swedish economists named Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner designed the economic model that would define Swedish social democracy for decades. The core of the Rehn-Meidner model was the “solidaristic wage policy”: wages would be set centrally, at the same level across all companies in the same industry, regardless of those companies’ profitability.

The consequences of this were deliberately brutal. Companies that couldn’t afford the centrally bargained wage would go under. They were supposed to go under. The labor freed from dying companies would be caught by active labor market policies and redirected to thriving ones. The whole system was designed to accelerate creative destruction while socializing its costs. The phrase Rehn used was “security by wings” rather than “security under shells.” You don’t protect the worker by keeping them in a dying firm. You protect the worker by making sure they can fly to a living one.

This is the opposite of the Labor Left’s instinct. A traditional labor movement exists to protect workers at their current jobs. The Rehn-Meidner model existed to let current jobs die while protecting workers’ ability to get new ones. Workers were permanent. Firms were temporary. The entire safety net was built around this inversion.

But the Rehn-Meidner model also produced its own crisis, and this is where your point three comes in. The solidaristic wage policy compressed wages, which meant that highly productive firms were paying workers less than their productivity warranted. The result was enormous profits at those firms, concentrated in a small number of industrial families. Sweden had solved income inequality while accidentally generating massive wealth inequality.

Rudolf Meidner’s proposed fix was the wage-earner funds: a mechanism that would gradually socialize corporate ownership by requiring large firms to issue new shares to union-controlled funds each year. Over time, workers would collectively own the means of production. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation adopted the plan unanimously in 1976 and reportedly burst into a spontaneous rendition of the Internationale.

Employers were less enthusiastic. In 1983, 75,000 people marched in Stockholm against the proposal, the largest demonstration in Swedish history. A watered-down version passed, was implemented, and was killed when a conservative government took power in 1991.

What happened next is the part of the story that the Swedish Style’s admirers prefer to skip past. The early 1990s brought a severe financial crisis. GDP contracted. Unemployment, which had been negligibly low for decades, spiked.

The government responded with austerity: benefit cuts, welfare retrenchment, and a series of market-oriented reforms that would have been recognizable to any Thatcherite. Sweden introduced school vouchers. It partially privatized its pension system. It cut replacement rates on unemployment insurance. Over the following decades, inequality increased significantly. The country that had been the world’s model of egalitarian social democracy began to look, in some respects, more like everywhere else.

This matters enormously for the binary, because it reveals the structural vulnerability at the heart of the Swedish Style. The entire model depends on high taxes funding generous universal programs. This requires a productive economy to tax, political will to maintain the tax base, and social consensus that the taxes are worth paying. If any of these cracks (and in Sweden, all three cracked simultaneously in the early 1990s), the model doesn’t just need adjustment. It needs to be rebuilt from something close to first principles.

The Labor Left’s protections don’t have this vulnerability, or at least not in the same way. A union contract exists whether the economy is booming or crashing. Employment protection law doesn’t disappear when the government changes (though it can be weakened).

The fortress is not immune to attack, but it degrades slowly. The trampoline can tear suddenly. And when it tears, the people who gave up workplace protections in exchange for social insurance discover that they have neither.

There is a counterargument, and it’s fair. Fortress protections can also erode: labor courts can be defunded, enforcement agencies can be weakened, unions can be broken. No system is truly immune to political attack. But the rate and visibility of erosion matters. When a government cuts unemployment benefits, the effect is immediate and universal and produces a political backlash. When a government quietly underfunds a labor enforcement agency, the effect is distributed across thousands of individual cases that never become a political story. The fortress degrades by neglect. The trampoline degrades by policy, which means it degrades faster and more completely when the political winds shift.

Matt Bruenig, the founder of the People’s Policy Project, has written extensively about how Nordic economies are far more socialistic than American commentators realize: they feature enormous state ownership, strong public sectors, and labor markets governed by centralized union contracts. But the American discussion of the Nordic model tends to cherry-pick. The American left wants the welfare state half (universal healthcare, free college, generous parental leave) without the labor market half (easy firing, solidaristic wage compression, the deliberate destruction of unproductive firms). They want the trampoline without dismantling the fortress.

This may be incoherent. The trampoline is funded by the taxes on a dynamic, productive economy. The fortress’s labor market rigidity (hard to fire, hard to restructure, hard to let unproductive firms die) undermines the dynamism that generates the wealth that funds the trampoline. The two approaches aren’t just different strategies for the same goal. They operate on different theories of what an economy is for, and mixing them may produce the worst of both: an economy too rigid to grow fast enough to fund the programs that its rigidity makes necessary.

Or it may not. Some economists argue that the contradiction is overstated, that you can have strong worker protections and generous welfare programs if you’re willing to accept slower growth and fund the difference with even higher taxes.

The Nordic countries themselves are not purely one model or the other. Sweden has strong unions alongside its flexible labor market. Denmark has both high labor market flexibility and comprehensive income support. The real world is messier than the binary.

But the binary clarifies something that the mess obscures. When you argue about labor policy, you are always arguing about two things at once: what the experience of working should be like, and what kind of society you want to build around the work. The Labor Left says: make the work itself dignified. The Swedish Style says: make the society dignified enough that the work doesn’t have to carry that burden.

This binary shows up in places you might not expect:

– Tenure in academia is pure Labor Left: once you have it, you’re nearly unfireable, and the justification is that intellectual freedom requires job security. But the cost is borne by adjunct professors, who teach the same classes without any of the protections, creating exactly the two-tier system. A Swedish Style university would mean no tenure but robust research funding, portable benefits, and universal healthcare that doesn’t depend on your appointment status.

– Professional sports leagues split along this line. European soccer uses rigid contracts, steep transfer fees, legal disputes over player movement. American major leagues use something closer to the Swedish Style: free agency, salary caps, revenue sharing, and a draft system that redistributes talent. Both produce competitive leagues, but with different distributions of power and risk.

– The gig economy is what happens when you remove both models simultaneously. Uber drivers have no workplace protections and no societal safety net. The political debate is precisely this binary: some advocates want to reclassify gig workers as employees (build the fortress), while others want to create portable benefits funded by platform fees that follow the worker from gig to gig (build the trampoline).

– Homeownership versus renting maps here in a surprising way. The thirty-year mortgage is a fortress: your housing costs are locked, you’re protected from rent increases, but you’re also trapped, immobile, tied to a specific place. Renting in a well-regulated market with strong tenant protections and housing subsidies is the Swedish Style: less wealth accumulation, more flexibility, security coming from the system rather than from a specific asset.

– Military service versus national service programs embody the split. A professional military with strong retention incentives, pensions, and post-service benefits is fortress logic applied to defense. Universal conscription with robust transition support (as practiced in several Nordic countries) is the Swedish Style: everyone serves, nobody’s career is permanently defined by it, and the social contract covers the transition back.

There is an old problem in the history of shelter, older than economics, older than policy, older than the word “worker” in any language we still speak. It is the problem of the wall and the road.

The wall keeps out the weather. It keeps out the wolves. It defines a space that is yours, where the rules are known and the dangers are mapped. To build a wall is the first act of civilization, and every subsequent act of civilization is, in some sense, a refinement of that original gesture: here is inside, here is outside, here is where we are safe. The great walled cities of Mesopotamia, the commons enclosures of England, the union hall with its locked doors and its membership rolls. The wall says: what we have, we hold.

The road goes somewhere. It connects one place to another, and in connecting them it implies that no single place is sufficient, that the good life requires movement, that staying put is its own kind of danger.

The Roman roads that stitched an empire together. The trade routes that carried silk and plague in equal measure. The railroad that made it possible for a farmer’s son to become a factory worker in a city he’d never seen. The road says: what we need, we’ll find.

Every civilization negotiates between these two, and the negotiation is never settled, because the wall and the road want incompatible things. The wall wants stability. The road wants change. The wall wants to protect what exists. The road wants to discover what doesn’t yet. And the people who build walls are not wrong, and the people who build roads are not wrong, and the tragedy (if it is a tragedy, and not simply the human condition) is that you cannot have the full benefit of one without accepting the full cost of the other.

The Swedish economists who designed the postwar labor market understood something that their French and British counterparts did not, or understood differently. They understood that a wall, once built, becomes the thing its inhabitants defend, and that the defense of the wall eventually becomes more important than the safety it was built to provide. A union that exists to protect its members’ jobs will, over sufficient time, begin to protect the jobs at the expense of the members, because the jobs have become the structure and the members have become interchangeable. The Swedes tried to reverse this: to make the members the structure and the jobs interchangeable. Whether they succeeded is still being argued. That they tried is remarkable.

But the French and Italian workers who cling to their labor protections also understand something. They understand that a road without rest stops is just exile. That mobility without roots is indistinguishable from homelessness. That the promise of “retraining” rings hollow when you are fifty-three and your knees hurt and the only thing you were ever truly good at was the thing they’re telling you is obsolete. The wall may be a prison for some. For others it is the only home they have.

In the old Norse sagas (and it is worth remembering that the Scandinavians who invented the welfare state are the descendants of the people who invented the longship), there is a concept called grið, which means roughly “sanctuary” or “truce” or “the peace that prevails within a defined space.” Grið was not a permanent condition. It was declared for a specific place and time: the assembly ground, the market, the hall during a feast. Outside grið, the normal rules of feud and violence applied. What matters about grið is that it was portable in principle but fixed in practice. You could declare it anywhere. But it only worked where people agreed to honor it.

The fortress and the trampoline are both attempts to create grið in an economy that does not naturally produce it. They differ on where the sanctuary is located: in the job or in the system, in the specific or in the general, in the wall or in the road. They agree that sanctuary is necessary. They agree that work without dignity is not work but servitude. They disagree, endlessly and probably permanently, on what dignity requires.

The wall and the road do not resolve into each other. They sit on either side of a question that has no answer, only choices, each of them costly, each of them real.

Yoselin Sangbelles, Vyacheslav Breaker, and Kerry Melbyn

YOSELIN: The garden plots were assigned at the beginning of the season. Marta has the northeast corner. Teodor has the raised beds. I have the south wall, because the south wall gets the most light and I am the person who will use that light correctly. These assignments are not arbitrary. They reflect who showed up, who committed, who earned their space.

VYACHESLAV: Marta hasn’t been to the garden in six weeks.

YOSELIN: Marta has a plot. She paid her dues. She attended the orientation. She has a right to her plot whether she visits it daily or not. That is what “having a plot” means.

VYACHESLAV: Her plot is full of dandelions.

YOSELIN: Her dandelions are not your concern.

VYACHESLAV: They are literally blowing seeds into my radishes, Yoselin.

KERRY: Just to be clear, we’re fighting about dandelions. I want everyone to be aware of the genre we’re in.

YOSELIN: We are fighting about whether commitments mean anything. If Marta can lose her plot because she’s been busy for six weeks, then none of us have plots. We have temporary permissions that can be revoked whenever someone else decides they want our space. That isn’t a community garden. It’s a lottery with vegetables.

VYACHESLAV: What I’m proposing is simple. Nobody owns a plot permanently. At the start of each month, anyone who wants to garden signs up. Plots are assigned based on who’s actually going to use them. If you don’t sign up, your plot goes to someone who will. If you come back next month, you get a plot again. Maybe not the same one. But a plot.

YOSELIN: And my perennials?

VYACHESLAV: What about them?

YOSELIN: I have asparagus in the south wall bed. Asparagus takes three years to establish. Three years of careful soil amendment, of pH monitoring, of not harvesting so the crowns could develop. If someone else gets my bed next month because I went on vacation, and they rip out my asparagus to plant zucchini, I will commit an act of violence that will be discussed at community meetings for decades.

VYACHESLAV: So we note the perennials. Perennial beds get continuity. Annual beds rotate.

YOSELIN: And who decides which beds are which? You? You planted sunflowers in a soaker-hose zone. You put tomatoes in the shade. You treat gardening like it’s something you can optimize by reading one article and then never thinking about again.

VYACHESLAV: My tomatoes produced fine.

YOSELIN: Your tomatoes produced adequately, which you interpreted as fine because you don’t know what good tomatoes look like.

KERRY: This is the part where I point out that Yoselin’s south-wall asparagus bed is immaculate, and also that she’s eaten approximately zero asparagus from it in three years because the crowns aren’t ready yet. She is protecting an investment that hasn’t paid off.

YOSELIN: It will pay off. That is the entire point. Year four, Kerry. Year four is when you harvest.

KERRY: And Slav’s monthly rotation system would, in practice, mean that he does the same thing he always does (plant whatever he feels like in whatever bed is available) while experiencing zero disruption, because he has no perennials, no long-term plans, and no emotional attachment to any specific patch of dirt. He’s designed a system that is perfectly optimized for people exactly like him.

VYACHESLAV: I designed a system that is optimized for the garden producing food, which I assumed was the purpose of the garden.

YOSELIN: The purpose of the garden is to garden. The food is a consequence of gardening well. If you optimize for output you’ll end up with twelve plots of zucchini because zucchini is easy, and nobody will grow anything difficult, and the garden will be an efficient machine for producing vegetables that nobody actually wants.

VYACHESLAV: People want zucchini.

YOSELIN: Nobody wants zucchini. People tolerate zucchini. People accept zucchini because it shows up in such abundance that refusing it feels rude. Zucchini is the participation trophy of vegetables.

KERRY: I need that on a garden sign.

VYACHESLAV: Look. Teodor hasn’t used his raised beds in two months either. Hanna has been on the waiting list since April. She comes to every meeting. She brings cookies. She has a plan for winter squash that she’s clearly been thinking about since January. Under Yoselin’s system, Hanna doesn’t get a bed because Teodor claimed one first. Under mine, Hanna signs up next month, Teodor doesn’t, Hanna gets a bed.

YOSELIN: And when Teodor comes back in August because his schedule cleared up?

VYACHESLAV: He signs up in August. He gets whatever’s available.

YOSELIN: Not his raised bed. Not the bed he built. He built those raised beds, Slav. With his own lumber. On a weekend when it rained.

VYACHESLAV: And they’re very nice raised beds that someone should be using.

KERRY: I think the actual disagreement here is about whether the garden belongs to the gardeners or the gardeners belong to the garden. Yoselin thinks the plots are extensions of the people who tend them. Slav thinks the people are temporary occupants of the plots. Both of them are right about what makes their own gardening good, and wrong about what makes the other person’s gardening bad, and the garden as a whole will produce roughly the same amount of food regardless of which system we use, because it’s a community garden and the actual limiting factor is that everyone is tired on weekday evenings.

YOSELIN: That is not the limiting factor.

KERRY: It is absolutely the limiting factor.

VYACHESLAV: It is a little bit the limiting factor.

YOSELIN: I garden on weekday evenings.

KERRY: You garden on weekday evenings because gardening is the thing you do instead of resting. That’s why your asparagus bed is perfect. It’s also why you would rather fight about plot allocation for forty-five minutes than consider the possibility that your attachment to your specific bed might not be the same thing as good policy for the garden.

YOSELIN: (pause) My asparagus will be extraordinary.

VYACHESLAV: I believe you.

YOSELIN: Year four.

VYACHESLAV: I know.

References and Sources

Matt Bruenig, “Nordic Socialism Is Realer Than You Think” — Nordic economies feature extensive state ownership and labor market regulation beyond just the welfare state.

Jacobin, “Nordic Social Democracy Is Good for Everybody Except the Rich” — Income comparison showing the bottom 60% of Danes are better off than the bottom 60% of Americans.

Wikipedia: Rehn-Meidner Model — The Swedish solidaristic wage policy and its “security by wings” philosophy.

Wikipedia: Flexicurity — The Danish labor market model combining easy hiring/firing with generous social insurance.

OnLabor, “A Swedish Answer to Labor’s $8 Trillion Question” — The Meidner Plan and wage-earner funds as a strategy for socializing corporate ownership.