Published 27 March 2024 at 09.24
Domestic. Several trade unions demand that Statistics Sweden start keeping statistics on people's skin color. This is to be able to follow the “structural racism”.
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The new requirement to register “equality data”, as they call it, comes from the unions Municipal, Vårdförbundet and the cultural worker's union DIK.
“Looking at ancestry (where a person and their parents were born) gives some information. However, it does not give the whole picture and means that many who are exposed to racism because of their skin color is not caught”, write the presidents of these unions in a debate article in Expressen.
The unions want SCB to be tasked with “keeping statistics linked to skin color with the aim of countering discrimination”.
The Discrimination Ombudsman (DO) should also be given “a special task to analyze racism based on skin color and submit proposals for measures” – and major state employers should be forced to collect “equality data”, according to the unions.
– It is a nice idea that everyone should be treated equally and that we should be color blind in the labor market. But reality does not look like that, says Kommunal's chairman Malin Ragnegård to Göteborgs-Posten.
Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg (L), however, states that it is not appropriate to keep such statistics as it risks worsening “segregation”. She refers to the fact that it can lead to people, for example, opting out of areas where many people of other ethnicities live.