What happened
On October 7, the police carried out a raid together with seven other authorities at SSAB's facility in Oxelösund. Nineteen Filipino electrical engineers were arrested at the workplace and taken into custody with deportation orders and entry bans. The police claimed that the engineers' employment contracts through Dutch and Italian companies violated the rules. On October 16, the Swedish Migration Agency overturned the police's decision and ruled that the engineers have a legal right to work in Sweden under EU rules on posted workers. The nineteen workers have been released from detention and have returned to complete their work at the facility.
Our analysis
The workers are needed to build the Swedish industry of the future, but are treated primarily as suspects. When the state talks about cracking down on fraud, it is not the big corporations or the convoluted contracting chains that are locked behind bars. It is the specialists who do the heavy lifting.
The engineers who are building the country's industry had to spend over a week in migration detention before a review showed that they had not broken a single law. The usual debate constantly revolves around stopping people at the border. It completely forgets that Swedish basic industry grinds to a halt without the expertise of new and foreign workers.
Instead of investigating why 19 innocent workers were deprived of their liberty, the police are now demanding stricter laws to be able to stop similar arrangements in the future. When authorities make mistakes, the response is not self-examination, but demands for more powers to lock people up.
Explained
Posting of workers means that an employer in an EU country sends employees to another EU country to work there for a limited period of time. The rules are governed by the EU's Posting of Workers Directive and grant workers the right to work temporarily in Sweden under certain conditions.