Search

The article explores the work routines of preparing for deportations, alongside the work-life situation of employees who handle the task of deporting people. Via an ethnographic account from Swedish detention centers, where immigrants' forced removal by way of chartered journeys is prepared for, the article elucidates how 'affective labor' goes into deportation. Through a close examination of the work dynamics among employees, discussed via the 'game' concept, the article reveals what is significant for realizing deportations and how this occurs in the interplay both of staff members and between those personnel and deportees. Thereby, it offers profound insight as to how employees cope with the task of detaining people and deporting them. The author concludes that the deportation work, in addition to being conditioned by legal frameworks, is characterized by work-life challenges tying in with general tendencies that have global counterparts. A significant contribution to deportation scholarship is visible in further knowledge of the affective labor that deportation entails, coupled with the argument that it constitutes a key dimension of Sweden's deportation regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Society is facing multiple challenges, including lifestyle- and age-related diseases of major public health relevance, and this is of particular importance when the general population, as well as the workforce, is getting older. In addition, we are facing global climate change due to extensive emissions of greenhouse gases and negative environmental effects. A lifestyle that promotes healthy life choices as well as climate and environmentally friendly decisions is considered a sustainable lifestyle., Objective: This study aims to evaluate if providing information about a sustainable lifestyle encourages individuals to adopt more nutritious dietary habits and increase physical activity, as compared to receiving information solely centered around health-related recommendations for dietary intake and physical activity by the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations and the World Health Organization. Novel features of this study include the use of the workplace as an arena for health promotion, particularly among office workers-a group known to be often sedentary at work and making up 60% of all employees in Sweden., Methods: The Sustainable Office Intervention (SOFIA) study is a 2-arm, participant-blinded, cluster randomized controlled trial that includes a multilevel sustainable lifestyle arm (intervention arm, n=19) and a healthy lifestyle arm (control arm, n=14). The eligibility criteria were being aged 18-65 years and doing office work ≥20 hours per week. Both intervention arms are embedded in the theoretically based behavioral change wheel method. The intervention study runs for approximately 8 weeks and contains 6 workshops. The study focuses on individual behavior change as well as environmental and policy features at an organizational level to facilitate or hinder a sustainable lifestyle at work. Through implementing a citizen science methodology within the trial, the participants (citizen scientists) collect data using the Stanford Our Voice Discovery Tool app and are involved in analyzing the data, formulating a list of potential actions to bring about feasible changes in the workplace., Results: Participant recruitment and data collection began in August 2022. As of June 2024, a total of 37 participants have been recruited. The results of the pilot phase are expected to be published in 2024 or 2025., Conclusions: Given the ongoing climate change, negative environmental effects, and the global epidemic of metabolic diseases, a sustainable lifestyle among office workers holds important potential to help in counteracting this trend. Thus, there is an urgent unmet need to test the impact of a sustainable lifestyle on food intake, physical activity, and environmental and climate impacts in a worksite-based randomized controlled trial. This study protocol responds to a societal need by addressing multilevel aspects, including individual behavior changes as well as environmental and organizational changes of importance for the successful implementation of sustainable lifestyle habits in an office setting., International Registered Report Identifier (irrid): DERR1-10.2196/57777., (©Katarina Bälter, Abby C King, Johanna Fritz, Annika Tillander, Oskar Halling Ullberg. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (https://www.researchprotocols.org), 31.07.2024.)

Recent changes in older people's public care services in Nordic countries in particular in Finland and Sweden are based on implicit expectations that family members will increase their involvement in care. In Nordic countries, the care of small children has been acknowledged to be a social matter that concerns gender equality and the work life participation of both men and women, while the situation of working carers of older people is much less acknowledged. This study addressed the question of how Finnish working women who give care to their older parents argue for and against their decisions of working and caring and the meaning of work and care in these decisions. Majority of the interviewees emphasised the importance of work and refuted the idea of leaving work for care. The decision not to leave work for care was justified with worker identity, commitment to work, having no innate skills to be a carer, availability of support services and other carers and financial necessity. On the other hand, a few interviewees brought forward their willingness to leave work which was justified by constructing care as meaningful and valuable activity as opposed to meaningless paid employment, and with the intensification of work, and with ageing. Lengthy argumentation and several discursive tools indicate that women anticipated moral blame for the decision of giving work primacy over care, but also for leaving work. Thus, working carers balance between contrasting expectations to care and to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A development programme was carried out by the Swedish government and the Swedish Labour Market Board (AF) over a period of more than twenty years. The paper describes a case history of a single national programme. Some significant conclusions from it are given. The rationale for the effort was the advent of micro-computers in the early 1980s and the ICT development in general. It was realised that people with disabilities would struggle in the job market if active measures were not taken. Within the AF expertise on different impairments and functional disorder was employed, often highly-skilled with many years of experience of helping people with workplace adaptations. In five years some 4000 jobs for disabled jobseekers were established by applying public procurement, partly on a pre-competitive basis. After these first five years the programme was regularised but still only as a development tool for another fifteen years, with a yearly budget of 0,5-1,0 M\psfig{figure=eur.eps,width=1.9mm}. The ICT technology offered successively a range of generative options, often pre-empting application to solutions beneficial for people having a variety of functional difficulties in their jobs. The projects were intended to include a potential to result in products or services on the open market. If new technology could be transferred into regular business, it would benefit the chief target groups and their procurers in the long run. One success case was Comfort Audio AB. The company was started in 1994 by two young entrepreneurs. Fifteen years later it employs some 60 people and finds its market all over the world with its cutting edge technology for hearing impaired persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]