Employees' freedom of expression and right to criticize : A study of the prerequisites in the public and private sector

Freedom of expression and the right to criticize are important prerequisites in the Swedish labor market. In fact, the freedom of expression is regulated in a long chain of protection, and not at least for the public employees which have the ECHR’s protection and the Swedish constitution embedded in their employment contracts. For the private employees, on the other hand, the legal situation looks completely different. A private employee does not receive equal opportunities to invoke the ECHR or the Swedish constitution when criticizing the employer. The main purpose of this paper is thus to investigate the legal situation for each sector, after which the legal situation must be compared and discussed in light of the duty of loyalty. As the right to criticize has become a major issue for discussion, Sweden received a whistleblower regulation in 2017 which came to protect workers from reprisals. Nonetheless, a couple of years have passed, and a new EU-directive has been introduced with a number of new requirements. In December 2021, Sweden will introduce a more comprehensive whistleblower regulation and replace the current regulation. The second purpose of this paper is accordingly to investigate the new protection and examine the possible impact of the protection in each sector. The conclusions of the paper were not entirely easy to summarize. What is clear is that there is no uniform protection in the sectors, and the enhanced protection may result in a smaller gap between the sectors, despite different interests.