The rules of priority : A study of the rules of priority related to layoffs and an acquisition of companies in Karlstad

Metso Paper in Karlstad is acquiring Kvaerner Pulping and Kvaerner Kamfab, also located in Karlstad. Following this acquisition, there are going to be changes in the organizational structure and some employees might even loose their jobs. There are guidelines from the European Union how to handle situations like this, the purpose of these are to protect the employees. There are also Swedish laws that regulate the protection of the employees when a company is acquired, who is going to keep their job and who is to be made redundant. The transaction between the companies is large why they need an approval from the European Union. The European Union has certain demands for the approval. Metso and Kvaerner have to sell some parts of the production to another company in order to not become too dominant in the market. In this essay we are investigating what the law says about layoffs and how it is handled in reality. We have kept focus on the paragraphs 6 b and 22 of the law regarding employment protection. These paragraphs regulate the protection for the employees in an acquisition, they also regulate who has to leave first in a potential of layoff situation. Important parts of the legislation protect employees with high age and those who have the longest employment time in the company. A prerequisite for keeping their jobs is that the employees have necessary knowledge and skills for the tasks he or she is going to perform. We have used traditional legal method so-called dogmatic method with empirical elements. The traditional method means to search through literature such as doctrine and dissertations for information and the empirical elements means for example the information we’ve gathered from the companies. We got the idea for this essay when we were doing our internships at Metso Paper and Kvaerner Kamfab, a part of our examination in this course. We were informed about the transaction and got curious about what was going to happen with the employees in the companies. Our result shows that almost everything is negotiable through collective bargaining agreements. Another conclusion is that when a Swedish company sells parts of the production to a company located in another country and with no intent to keep the production in Sweden, the law is not preventing them executing their plans