STOCKHOLM, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- One in three employees of the Swedish Public Employment Service will lose their job in one of the country's biggest public layoffs, Swedish Television SVT reported on Wednesday.
The move is expected to have a significant impact across the country, not least on jobseekers in Sweden.
In a press release, the Swedish Public Employment Service's Chief Executive, Mikael Sjoberg, described the job cuts as "a very heavy decision."
Sjoberg expects around 3,500-4,000 of the redundancies to be outside the head office in Stockholm, causing many of the agency's 240 offices to shut down.
The employment service flagged the redundancies late last year after substantial savings in the agency's expenditure were voted through in parliament when a new budget was adopted.
In addition to the 800 million SEK (88 million U.S. dollars) worth of direct funding cuts, the agency's budget for jobseeker assistance programs will be cut by 4.5 billion SEK.
The budget, backed by the Moderates Party and the Christian Democrats, called for slashing the agency's funding by as much as 800 million SEK. When the budget was announced, Sjoberg told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the parties had "not realized the consequences."
"The Public Employment Service has completely different budgetary conditions now and we have a January agreement that points out a new direction for the authority. We are trying to handle this and this means, among other things, that we must dismiss many of our employees," Sjoberg told SVT.
"The feeling is chaotic," commented Fredrik Andersson, the union's department chair at the Swedish Public Employment Service. Andersson had forewarning of the cull, but told SVT "this was bigger than we thought. This will have major consequences." (1 U.S. dollar = 9.09 SEK).
