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Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

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Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#51

Post by rayhendricks »

merpnderp wrote: post #43
ubermonkey wrote: post #42

This is a great idea, honestly, for the economy at large. If more people start more companies, we're probably all better off even if they don't all survive. If an American political party were TRULY pro-business and pro-entrepreneur, they'd get behind policies like this. They'd also support divorcing health care from employment, because holy COW how many folks would start a new venture IF ONLY they could afford priva…

The fact neither political party is for divorcing healthcare from employment goes to show how corrupted they are by the industry. This is such a slam dunk no brainer for improving not on the health care industry, but the quality of everyone's lives, the only reasonable explanation is corruption.

This is exactly what Bernie Sanders is doing. He is independent but was running as a Democrat in the 2016 election primary. https://berniesanders.com/issues/medicare-for-all/

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#52

Post by jakobegger »

zmodem wrote: post #31
mrmekon wrote: post #13

Since maternity and paternity leave are frequently more than 6 months long, employees temporarily leaving for a big chunk of the year is just a fact of doing business here. Granting unpaid leave to go try your own thing for a while is, from the employer's perspective, not any different. Some people never come back, most people do. The same is true for parental leave (many quit their jobs towards the end of their leav…

I think the proper English word for this role is contractor rather than consultant.

Is it?

I thought that a contractor is usually someone who is self-employed, whereas consultants are employed by a consultancy.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#53

Post by ThirdFoundation »

jakobegger wrote: post #52
zmodem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the proper English word for this role is contractor rather than consultant.

Is it? I thought that a contractor is usually someone who is self-employed, whereas consultants are employed by a consultancy.

It's confusing and depends on the industry. Sometimes they're used interchangeably. In some disciplines consultants literally just 'consult' and don't fill a role.

In the accounting world we have employees that we call 'contractors' but they aren't self-employed. Rather, they are employed by a specific accounting staffing agency that contracts with our firm to fill positions temporarily.

Sometimes contractors are employed by the company they are working with directly but the position isn't guaranteed to last before

Basically, like much of the English language, there isn't a hard rule. I imagine there are country, regional, and industry specific uses for the terms. There may have once been a hard distinction, but misuse of terms eventually permeates into local parlance, which gives way to a new accepted use of the term.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#54

Post by adetrest »

wjjdjw wrote: post #27
maxxxxx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first learned about this type of contract I couldn’t even believe the concept. How can anybody think it’s ok that a company can claim and kind of ownership over things an employee does in his free time? I have signed up for 40 hours a week and not for being fully owned by the company. What happens if you work another job and invent things there? Do the companies own each other’s stuff?

So would you assume you can work 40 hr and trade secrets from your employer as a side hustle, just because it's not happening within the work time?

You can do work on the side without disclosing your employers trade secrets, I would hope. There is nothing mysterious about yet another CRUD web application. Besides, confidentiality is covered separately and an NDA can stand on its own.

I suspect employers love restricting your right to have a side hustle so that they absolutely totally own you. If you have no other means of income besides your job they can lean on you pretty hard and there isn't much you can do about it if you like having a roof over your head.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#55

Post by elliekelly »

dahart wrote: post #46
52-6F-62 wrote: post #2

I think this is brilliant, but I’m interested to hear criticisms or arguments against it.

I think so too, I would love to have entrepreneur leave. Having quite my job to start a business before, the main thought in my head is that 6 months is not anywhere near long enough for the vast majority of business ideas to get off the ground, let alone succeed. In order to have any chance of success in 6 months, you would need to have launched your product before starting the 6 month period. You’d want to have sec…

> My startup was a 2 person software service -- just about the easiest thing you can do business wise

This gave me a chuckle. To most people who aren't on HN a software service, no matter the size, is a major business undertaking.

I have a friend who started a pilates studio. She loves pilates and the startup costs are minimal - a few thousand dollars total mostly for a small inventory of yoga pants and athleisure gear to sell. She quit her finance job to get it off the ground thinking it would take at least a year. It took her six weeks to have enough membership subscriptions to make her business profitable. She's a brilliant businesswoman and was working the front desk at a pilates studio and teaching a few classes. After three months she was understandably very bored. Her company still hadn't found a replacement for her so she hired a college kid to sit at the front desk and went right back to work.

There are a lot of "analog" small businesses people could get off the ground in 6 months I just think they aren't the sort we're used to hearing about here because HN is so tech focused.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#56

Post by dahart »

elliekelly wrote: post #55
dahart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so too, I would love to have entrepreneur leave. Having quite my job to start a business before, the main thought in my head is that 6 months is not anywhere near long enough for the vast majority of business ideas to get off the ground, let alone succeed. In order to have any chance of success in 6 months, you would need to have launched your product before starting the 6 month period. You’d want to have sec…

> My startup was a 2 person software service -- just about the easiest thing you can do business wise This gave me a chuckle. To most people who aren't on HN a software service, no matter the size, is a major business undertaking. I have a friend who started a pilates studio. She loves pilates and the startup costs are minimal - a few thousand dollars total mostly for a small inventory of yoga pants and athleisure ge…

FWIW, the popular alternative to software I had in my mind is starting a restaurant. It's pretty hard to do that in 6 months and usually costs a lot more up front than software.

You have a good point. My wife started teaching piano lessons after I quit my job, and her studio was at full capacity before my business was making any money. She's been at it for a while, but like your friend she's also experiencing a loss of motivation to continue doing it.

You're right that single person & analog face-to-face services are very easy businesses to start. I have to wonder if those are the kind that Sweden is actually encouraging with their leave program. These kinds of businesses don't scale at all, there's a growth wall that most people never get over, even when they're among the few that survive the motivation problem. This is especially true when the business is initially launched as a personal service and needs very little planning or investment.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#57

Post by lkrubner »

jhoechtl wrote: post #29
lkrubner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power…

This is one of the most brilliant and succinct put statements I have read in a while. However, do you have any pointers to underpin your statement?

See this graph:

http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Scree...

A few other graphs I collected on my weblog are here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/is-it-useful-to-have-a-...

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/do-men-become-warlike...

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/marriage-peaked-in-19...

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#58

Post by AltruisticGap »

In Belgium we have a "career break". 6 months, only condition is to be employed in the company for one year if I recall correctly. Employer can not refuse.

You also get paid basic allocations similar to unemployment, unlike this system.

You only get it once though.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#59

Post by progre »

timc3 wrote: post #24
INTPenis wrote: post #8

I'm an anonymous coward on here so I can give another perspective. My employer struggles to find skilled people and when one guy on my team suddenly disappeared for 6 months it was definitely felt. Before that I hadn't really grasped the idea yet. Even though I've lived in Sweden since I was a child. I just couldn't accept that you can duck out of your job for several months and then come back as if nothing happened.…

If you are in IT in Sweden you might want legal advice to check this out. Anything that you build outside of work might be owned by your employer by default.

I thought that's for patentable stuff. Regular software should be owned by the creator if its created outside of work.

Re: Sweden's leave of absence system helps workers launch their own business

#60

Post by rory096 »

merpnderp wrote: post #45
lkrubner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Male real wages have been stagnant since 1973, and that's without considering the situation around health care, where costs have risen much faster than general inflation. Counting health care, male real wages have declined noticeably since 1973. Meanwhile, returns to capital have grown dramatically. This is precisely what you would expect in a weak economy, where the workers necessarily lack bargaining power…

I've always wondered how much of the lack of wage growth can be explained by financial institutions investing in other countries. If the actual growth happens somewhere else, and some of the profits make it back to the US economy, also growing it, overall wages wouldn't really be affected, would they?

The US is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment and maintains a substantial capital account surplus. Capital inflows finance our current account deficits.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/mapping-capital-flows-us-over-last-...

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