Mot en mångfald av anställningsskydd? En analys av hur tanken om få men omfattande avtal enligt 2 c § LAS står sig mot den kollektiva arbetsrätten

Sammanfattning: This student thesis discusses one of the recent changes to the Swedish Employment Protection Act. As a part of a bigger legal reform, the provisions on what constitutes valid reasons for termination of employment have been made negotiable through collective agreements. Such collective agreements may now be struck between an employer or employer’s organization and a worker’s organization under the condition that the worker’s organization is on a highly centralized level, meaning that it must have nationwide (or “central”) unions as members. In contrast to the older provisions, these collective agreements may now impose a weaker employment protection on the employee. This is also how the new collective agreements have played out in practice, although there are still low-level unions that are not connected to such agreements and who might want to act for better employment protection for their members. One of the purposes behind the new collective bargaining provision is, however, to keep the number of deviations down, while simultaneously making sure that those deviations that are made apply to as many employees as possible, thus the requirement of a highly centralized union as a party to the agreement. The thesis discusses this new collective bargaining provision in the light of the provisions of the Co-determination in the Workplace Act. It explores the requirements of the new collective bargaining provision, namely what a collective bargaining agreement is, what legally makes a union, and how the questions of competing collective agreements, collective action and invisible clauses in collective agreements relate to the new Employment Protection provision. Among its findings are that the requirement of a highly centralized union is easily circumventable due to the low barrier for creating a union under the provisions of the Co-determination in the Workplace act, meaning that the purpose to keep the number of collective agreements down might be hard to fulfil. It also finds that collective action for an employment protection agreement is allowed but somewhat complicated by the fact that employment protection can be regulated through invisible clauses in an ordinary collective agreement. The thesis argues that competing agreements on employment protection should be separated in a way that, contrary to normal procedure, requires the employer to apply a later collective agreement on the members of the signing union party. This also, albeit indirectly, would go against the purpose of the collective bargaining provision since it means unions would have an incentive to form new high-level unions and take collective action to push for employment protection agreements on their own.