[Business] News Thriving Enterprises and Dying Farms Strike Action Avoided
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By Peter Berlin he Swedish labour union Handels had called for strike action among its members beginning on November 13. The day before, the union announced that the strike had been called off thanks to a last-minute agreement reached with the employer association Svensk Handel. Had the strike gone ahead, it would for instance
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Helping Americans job seekers
ntro, a Swedish recruitment company, was founded in 2019 and got off to a rocky start. Paradoxically, Covid-19 has helped boost the company’s fortunes. Instead of employing staff to interview and place job seekers, Intro uses artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly match applicants and vacancies online. The firm serves mainly the engineering and information technology sectors. Because the coronavirus has created an unprecedented workingfrom-home culture, it is possible for someone living in, say, San Diego to find full-time work with a company in Seattle. Since employers are no longer restricted to their immediate geographical areas in their search for staff, the former have a much wider choice of candidates. By the same token, applicants have a wider choice of prospective employers. Intro’s recruitment services have proven popular in Scandinavia, and particularly so in the United States. Unemployment is still a big problem on both sides of the Atlantic, and the situation may deteriorate further if new waves of the coronavirus force businesses to resume laying off in-
have affected deliveries of food items from central storage facilities to individual grocery stores, leaving some of the stores with empty shelves and forcing others to close their doors. A consequence of store closures might have been that customers would congregate in stores that still remained open, making social distancing more difficult and accelerating the spread of COVID-19. The labour dispute was primarily about pay, and the lowest paid
employees will now see a salary increase of around 5.5 percent over 29 months. The dispute was also about employment conditions – notably the tendency of companies to favour the highly unpopular zero-hour contracts whereby an employer does not have to guarantee the employee a minimum number of working hours. This matter and some other issues related to working conditions have yet to be resolved between the parties, but at least the threat of strike action is over for now.
house staff. Thanks to its innovative use of AI, Intro offers job seekers an opportunity to find new jobs quickly and to work from the safety of their homes.
decisions due to further spread of the virus, analysts fear that it may spell the end of the mink fur business in both countries.
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Reprieve for Scandinavian minks
n early November, the Danish Prime Minister announced that all 17 million minks on the country’s mink farms had to be culled. The stated reason was that the minks were found to carry a modified form of the coronavirus which could spread to humans and complicate the task of developing an effective vaccine. So far, 214 persons have been found to carry the modified virus. After 2½ million minks had already been killed, the Danish Parliament declared the culling to be against the law and decreed that it be halted immediately. In the meantime, the modified coronavirus has been detected in a small number of minks on farms in the southern Swedish province of Blekinge. Because the annual culling of minks for their fur is ongoing, the authorities see no need for additional culling due to the virus at the present time. Should the governments in Denmark and Sweden reverse their
Woman leads world's oldest company
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nnica Bresky was born in Greece in 1975. She left her home country as a teenager and travelled to Sweden in search of an education and a career. She succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Today she is the President and CEO of the Swedish-Finnish corporation Stora Enso with 26,000 employees worldwide and a history that goes back to the 13th century. Stora Enso calls itself “the renewable materials company.” Its eco-friendly products are based on wood Annica Bresky, President and biomass. and CEO, Stora Enso. They are utilized Photo: Fond&Fond by a range of industries and applications worldwide, such as building, retail, food and beverages, manufacturing, publishing, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, confectionary, hygiene and textiles.
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