1974 Employment Protection Act (LAS)
Olof Palme's first cabinet enacted the Employment Protection Act (Lagen om anställningsskydd, LAS) in 1974, the legal cornerstone of the Swedish labour model. The law imposed strict union-consultation rules, notice periods, valid-grounds requirements for dismissal, and the seniority-based priority rule — last in, first out — that would define internal labour markets for half a century.
Olof Palme‘s first cabinet passed Lagen om anställningsskydd — the Employment Protection Act, universally known as LAS — in 1974. The statute imposed strict procedural protections on dismissal: mandatory union consultation, written notice periods scaled to tenure, statutory grounds requirements (“saklig grund”), and the seniority-based priority rule that gave long-tenure employees first claim on remaining positions in any redundancy.
LAS sits as the worker-protection counterpart to the union-organised collective bargaining structure inherited from the Saltsjöbaden spirit of 1938. Together with the 1976 codetermination act (MBL), it marked the high-water mark of the Palme labour-law expansion. The seniority rule restructured internal labour markets for a generation, giving long-tenure employees substantial protection and shifting employer adjustment toward fixed-term contracts and outsourcing.
LAS has been revised — most consequentially in 1982 and again in the 2022 reform negotiated under Magdalena Andersson‘s cabinet — but never repealed. The seniority rule remained one of the most contested features of the Swedish labour market through the 1980 great conflict, the 1990s structural debates, the Januari-avtalet negotiations, and the 2022 statutory revision.