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Comment by kiith_naabal | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: most Swedes are covered by unemployment insurance, which gives you 70-80% of the income from your last job for a year.[1] I imagine this helps, as it's not only a safety net if your startup tanks, but also a runway for starting risky ventures.

[1] https://www.justlanded.se/english/Sweden/Sweden-Guide/Jobs/U...

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If you own the company that tanks it is harder to get the unemployment insurance [1] (in Swedish) but it is possible. The 80% maxes out at 18 700 SEK / month ($2300) before tax.

[1] https://www.foretagande.se/a-kassa-for-foretagare-sa-fungera...

> The 80% maxes out at 18 700 SEK / month ($2300) before tax.

Many unions will offer you cheap insurances covering up to 3 times that amount. And you can actually be in the union and get many benefits even as an entrepreneur.

It's capped at a low level, it's not 70-80% for a typical programmer salary. I think I would get like 35% of what I earn.

In the US you can't collect unemployment if you quit and you have to demonstrate that you're looking for a job. Are either of those the case in Sweden?

If you quit, as opposed to being fired, you have to wait three months before being able to apply. You have to prove applying for jobs as well.

Doesn't that just encourage people to get fired instead of quitting?

(German here, but pretty much the same situation.)

Not really. It's really hard to try and get fired, since the employees are protected pretty well. So in order to get fired you would have to mess up pretty bad, to a point where you would usually leave a lot of scorched earth, so very few people do that.

If you are on good terms with the company you can also "get fired" (I've heard of that in a few startups), so you can collect the benefits, but that only works in a small set of companys I think.

If you're fired for cause, they deny unemployment benefits.

You can't just stop doing your job, show up drunk, and yell obscenities at your boss all day. Well, you can, but you probably won't get unemployment benefits.

If you show up drunk or with anger management problems, the company is by law required to provide you with professional help. If that doesn't work, they can fire you and your benefits kick in from day 1.

Are you positive? I checked with Google and I may have the wrong keywords, but I'm not seeing that as a law in the United States.

Sadly, I have not just one - but two friends who have lost their jobs for showing up incapacitated. One wasn't alcohol, though. They were stuffed full of amphetamines - but the first one was drunk. Neither mentioned any employer offers of rehab.

Sorry about the confusion, I was talking about Sweden

It's all good. Employees don't get nearly as much protection here. I see that as a negative.

There is a quarantine period of a couple of months if you quit. You have to be looking for a job, which means submitting reports of what jobs you have applied for to the job exchange. There are quite severe restrictions on what you can do while on unemployment, but if you want to do a startup there is likely some program that allows you to get the money and do that.

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