12-03-2025
'To early to say' if Sweden will give foreign Northvolt staff special help
At a press conference held after the company was declared bankrupt on Wednesday, Persson was asked whether engineers from countries outside the EU would be exempted from a rule requiring them to get a new job within three months of being made redundant or lose their right to be resident in Sweden.
The government, he said, did not intend to put into place any special measures, but would instead rely on the country's well-established system for major bankruptcies and lay-offs.
"This is precisely the same support system that we always kick into action when there is this kind of crisis," he said. "This is precisely the same model that has served Sweden so well."
It was, he said, "a little too early to answer" questions over "how many are from other countries and how many are born in Sweden and so on", saying this was something that needed to be "analysed calmly" together with the municipality and the company.
He expressed his sympathy with all of those affected by the decision to put Northvolt into bankruptcy.
"I have of course a great understanding for the turbulence, the worry, and that you might feel a bit dazed on a day like this," he said. "This is a tough decision and this is something I mean both sincerely and with consideration, Swedish society is built to handle this sort of crisis."
Workers made redundant will first be supported by a salary guarantee, after which they will be eligible for A-kassa unemployment benefits and support to retrain to make themselves more employable.
He emphasised, however, that Sweden has a tradition of not intervening to prop up failing companies.
"Our starting principle is that we don't, perhaps unlike other countries, generally support individual companies. We do not rescue specific jobs but we support people in finding new ones and we support people in a tough time," he said.
At the same press conference, Sweden's business minister Ebba Busch said that she still hoped that a way could be found to keep Northvolt's battery factories in Skellefteå and Västerås operating.
"I hope of course that the operation will now be able to find a new long-run owner, and that is something the state is of course ready to support," she said.
She expressed scepticism, however, about the possibility of a Chinese buyer stepping in, arguing that a key part of Northvolt's strategic rationale had been that it was a European-owned battery producer.
"It's not the case that there's been a lack of players in the battery market, it's more that we've had a surplus of battery manufacturers in Europe, of whom very few have been European," she said. "That [being a European company] has been their big competitive advantage. That's a choice the company itself can make if it doesn't want to have that unique selling point."
There was a bigger picture, she continued, above and beyond the individual case of Northvolt, which was the anti-competitive behaviour from China and the US, and the need to build up European independence in strategic industries like batteries.
"The playing field is not fair for battery manufacturers in the European market and it probably never has been," she said. "I think Europe has been far too naive in many of the critical parts of the green transition in the face of competition from countries who act in ways that would never be acceptable within the EU's own territory, but which right now is what is knocking out otherwise viable European companies."
In the same way that Europe is now ramping up its military defence, she said, it needed to build up independent production in the key technologies needed for the green and digital transitions.
"If we're going to rearm Europe and Sweden to be strong in a real way we can't just do it militarily," she said. "We also need to look at those parts of our business sector which allow us to safeguard our independence and which also safeguard the growth which means that we can continue to finance both our defence and our welfare going forward."
