The Swedish private-sector labor market is unusual, even compared with other European countries. It is undergirded by coercion, creating a framework or model. That model is not something for countries like the United States to try to emulate.
Within Sweden’s private-sector labor-market framework, the players have learned give-and-take. The workplace, fundamentally, is a team effort in which employers and employees are trading partners. The formation of the model was highly dependent on Swedish history and circumstances. Its continuance depends upon the responsible use of power by the chief actors, labor unions and employers. The power I speak of is, in the main, market power conferred by the coercion that undergirds the model.
“Materiality” has been the hallmark of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disclosure regime since the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in TSC v. Northway. Materiality limits disclosures “to those matters to which there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable investor would attach importance in determining whether to purchase the security registered.” In the SEC’s recently proposed rule on climate-change disclosures, the SEC tries, but fails, to make the argument that the proposed disclosures will provide investors with “material” information that is critical to their investment decisions. That the SEC even tries to make a materiality argument may surprise many readers, as it is made so indirectly and done so poorly that readers may have missed it.