Summer Slumber

It's simply unbelievable...roads in Stockholm are suddenly deserted. The stretch from my office in Kista to home where the traffic normally crawls during rush hours now goes past in a jiffy.

Weekend shopping has also has gone through a phase change; not only I can park my car at the nearest row, but I can chose between, say, a sunny or an under-the-shed spot! The isles in the super markets are empty...no collision of trollies, no queue at the fresh fish counter. And I can now almost walk past the payment counter.

 No, there hasn’t been a great calamity or natural disaster or outbreak of epidemic; just the Swedes have deserted Stockholm in folks as the vacation season started.

 Right after the "Midsommer dag" (the summer solstice on 23rd. June) virtually everybody in Sweden goes on holiday...for five or six consecutive weeks!


This is more than any such thing I've seen or heard anywhere else. And don't forget I've worked for an year in France, whose August vacation is mocked a lot on the other side of the Channel. Even that 4 weeks French vacation is dwarfed by its 6 weeks long Swedish counterpart. In all fairness, even French tend to stagger it partially between the colleagues.

 But here in Sweden, no staggering of holidays or splitting it to spread across different times of the year. Everyone will take the whole of it starting at the same time. As the lovely summer in Sweden lasts for about 6 weeks (or less!) no one wants to miss a single day of it.

 This is of course not all...on top of these six summer weeks, there are generous allowances for sick leave or parental leave, if you have young kids. And if you can produce a new progeny, you can say good bye to your office for nearly a year and a half!

I'm not at all in favour of American way of no paid holiday...where the workers are exploited for the benefit of company owners. And I do believe that holidays make the workforce happy and recharged who in turn become more productive.

Still what baffles me about the Swedish way is how do they sustain it? Firstly how can a country function when everybody is on holiday for 6 good weeks? And secondly, how is it viable economically?

Of course certain emergency services have to be kept open even in summer. This is done by a lot of temporary workers (mostly foreign). This is more expensive and often less effective: Last year I had to visit the GP surgery during summer. The doctor who checked me up was a temporary one and had told me that I'll see a different one during my prescribed return visit an week after....as he would move to a different hospital in 3 days! Not the best of medical care, is it?

But the Swedes seem not to mind such minor inconveniences and insists that taking all these weeks together is important, to unwind properly!

 It seems to be working pretty well for them (though not sure how!); so I'm just trying to make the best out of it. After all driving in traffic free roads or finishing weekly shopping in 15 minutes is blissful.

Working in an empty office feels spooky and I do miss the fika with my colleagues. But then I can update my blog more regularly during this rather quiet period.

 So the balance sheet is positive I guess! Or maybe, with passing time I'm becoming one of them.... not in height perhaps, but in spirit, nevertheless!

Begining of the end?

Are the welfare states on the verge of collapse? No matter how I might dislike it, present signs increasingly point towards that.

The concept of sharing and caring, which emerged from the runis of world war II, when people understood the importance of a collaborative soceity in a hard way, seems to be easily forgotten within just sixty years.

The hurricane of biggest world war flattened many barriers quickly:  The strong class barriers and elitism were swept away. It even eroded the centuries old gender discrimination to a large degree and propelled the feminism to a new height. The scarcity of working age men opened the hetherto closed doors to women whose competence dispelled age old myths about "gender-suitable" jobs.

But all these are coming back in a new look. We are seeing a new generation of nouveau riche "celebs" whose socio-emotional gossips in page 3 attracts many more readers than the actual news. The feminism has also taken a back step in the recent years whith the increasing number of stay at home mums; espsecially where the affoardable child care is not available.

In the recent years the welfare states were under big pressure due to increasing demand of the growing population and stagnating economy of the developed nations. The recent economic downturn seemed to work like the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Yet if we look carefully, it seems to be more like a shift in attitude rather than a solely economic one. The neo-elite rich, who once again are controlling the money and power in the society care about nothing but themselves.

Their greed, incompetence and selfishness brought the banking sector to the brink. But the biggest irony is these very people were put in charge to draft the rescue plan where they protected their interest unashamedly while preaching austerity measures for the rest of the soceity.

Wheather it is Obama's incapacity to put stimulous to the economy, or EU's bailout packange to Greece with some absurd conditions of austerity or Cameron's latest rhetoric on benefit cuts....it's the different facets of the same agenda: save the interest of the rich at the expense of common public.

It's fine to destory the best public health care system in the world (NHS) or to terminate the housing benefits for unemployed youth or to cut the child care allowance for struggling families. But you can't take a farthing away from the hefty bonuses of the bank bosses.

As Gandhi once said:"There is enough for everybody's need, but not enough for anybody's greed"!