Text published in Dagens Nyheter

It seems like some forces have completely misunderstood what our society is built on. We need openness to develop and strengthen our society. That is why I’m once again calling on wage earners and capitalists: Unite in this struggle!” So writes financier Robert Weil, echoing an essay published in DN Debatt in 1999.

Wage earners and capitalists, unite! September 9 may well be the most important Swedish election since World War II. This year, we voters have a greater responsibility than ever before. We stand at a crossroads: the choice is between political beliefs that advocate isolation and would block our openness to the rest of the world, and political beliefs that sustain our strong tradition of cooperation.

I completely understand that we face challenges in the wake of this wave of immigration and that we must stand up for and maintain our Swedish social safety net, including the collective bargaining agreements, job security legislation, and equal employment opportunities. But if we allow worries about these issues to shut down the openness that has been our unique strength, we will not be able to sustain or increase our prosperity. Instead, we will have to pay a price for tearing down the egalitarian society that we have built up over such a long time. Sweden is part of a global economy but has a small domestic market, so we need to adapt more than many other countries do. Thanks to long-term cooperation, wage earners, trade unions, corporations, and society as a whole have generated growth that made it possible to finance a quality of life that is among the most advanced in the world – and that has made us secure and enabled us to accept great change.

We were able to do this thanks to economic hardships that the wage earners bore the brunt of.

Thanks to our willingness to restructure and our openness to technology, we have been able to create internationally competitive enterprises. This is especially true of the most recent 20 years, when new enterprises and new markets have flourished in our operating environment. Open borders, with freedom for Swedes to be a part of the world and for people from other parts of the world to be a part of Sweden, have been a necessity. Our wage earners have seen their real wages increase 50 percent, an average of 2 percent per year. This meant that wages kept up with overall economic growth in Sweden, which few other countries achieved. Both our balance of payments and national budget have substantial surpluses. In addition, the Swedish krona is undervalued. All of this enables us, more than most other countries, to surmount the difficult challenges and significant risks that have emerged in the world economy in recent years.

In DN Debatt in 1999, I challenged Sweden’s capitalists to unite and thank the wage earners for all that they had gone without. At that time, capitalists had benefited more in the preceding 20 years than in any other two decades in the history of capital. In contrast, wage earners had gone without far too much. Sweden had experienced a period of massive transformation. Huge increases in oil prices during the 1970s created imbalances that had major consequences in the early 1980s. Inflation skyrocketed. But we handled this by enduring economic hardships, borne mainly by the wage earners. These efforts enabled us to rebuild our competitiveness and, during the latter 1990s, return to evenly dividing the pie between wage earners and capital. In an essay published in DN in 2008, I claimed that we capitalists had benefited again even more, because gift, inheritance, and wealth taxes had been abolished. Money brings power, and power entails responsibility. And that’s where we still stand today.

I am convinced that, in the same way as we created an open society together, we must now resist this impending isolation that will bring nothing but ill. Fearful people cannot create anything of value. That’s why we must struggle against the isolationist forces that we see in our country and in other places around the world. We voters must struggle to build our society in a way that we can be proud of, so that it will endure in the long run.

What we need is continued immigration to replace the huge waves of workers retiring. Our population is aging. One result of this is a greater need for workers. We can get them from other countries. To remain strong in this global economy, then, we must defend our history of openness and cooperation with the rest of the world.

What we need is continued immigration to replace the huge waves of workers retiring. We need this in our institutions of higher education and in our workplaces. We need it to care for our elders. We need it to continue to develop our technologically strong industries. We need it to deal with our enormous demand for affordable housing. We need it to build up our joint pension capital. This capital can only be preserved and earn the necessary returns if we strive to develop our open society.

Not least, we need an open society to create connections and understand the rest of the world and our role in it. More than ever, we must stand up for the diverse background to and origins of “Swedishness” – something that has made us internationally strong throughout time. It seems like some forces have completely misunderstood what our society is built on. We need openness to develop and strengthen our society. That is why I once again call on wage earners and capitalists: Unite in this struggle!

Robert Weil

”Kapitalister och löntagare, förena er i kamp för öppenhet!” – DN