The final word in the Swedish Laval
case has been said. In July Sweden’s Supreme Court rejected the trade
unions’ application to have last year’s judgement from the Labour
Court’s reversed. Strict rules apply for how and when the Supreme Court
can remove a judgement from the Labour Court. Its judgement cannot
normally be appealed. It is only possible to reverse a Labour Court
judgement if the court has been proven to have made an ‘obvious’ or
‘grave’ mistake. The Supreme Court decided that was not the case in
this instance.
Professor emeritus Tore Sigeman is one of Sweden’s leading experts
in labour law. In a newspaper article he suggested the state should
foot the bill for the considerable compensations which the trade unions
now must pay. He argued there was clear support in Swedish law for the
unions to take industrial action against the construction of the
Vaxholm school, and if the Swedish state had followed the EU Directive
on Posted Workers correctly this would never have happened. Hence it is
reasonable that the state takes responsibility for believing it could
act the way it did, argued professor Sigeman.
