When the jargon at work set aside the right to not be discriminated : A study about ethnic discrimination in terms of harassment due to ethnicity in Swedish working life

Sweden has been criticized from the United Nations as well as from the European Union for not putting enough effort into discouraging ethnic discrimination on the labour market. At the same time discrimination can be problematic while it’s a personal experience that is to be judged by criterions of the law. This seems to be a particular problem in cases of harassments. The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the national labour law of ethnic discrimination in terms of harassments due to ethnicity. Aiming at creating a more interesting study, the Critical race theory is used to analyze legal judgements from the labour court. By using the legal dogmatic method relevant laws, prepatory works and legal judgements are carefully analyzed in order to answer the research questions of the essay. The results of the study points out a special problem when work places are influenced by a rough jargon. This while the consequences are that harassed workers seems to get problems explaining their feelings of being insulted. A rough jargon also makes it harder for both employers and employees who insults others to get awareness and insight about occurrence of eventual harassments. The Swedish labour court tend to judge cases of harassments due to ethnicity restrictive, which results in an inability to respect the exposed employee’s experience. The way of using the burden of proof in these cases is also shown to be handled in a classic way by the labour court. The restrictive judgements and the way of using the burden of proof can be criticized, especially from a critical race point of view, since the consequence is a difficulty for ethnic discriminated employees to win approval in the labour court. Taken together it appears as the Swedish labour court is a part of the structural ethnic discrimination in the working life of Sweden