5-week class teaches Swedish childcare

Imagine you are a working, soon-to-be parent, both you and your spouse have jobs, and neither of your employers will give a leave of absence. If they do, that leave is unpaid. Do you quit your job to stay at home or put the child in daycare? Both alternatives are usually difficult and expensive, and they place a heavy burden on working parents.\nNow imagine a system that would pay working parents to stay at home with their small children for a full 13 months and provide affordable daycare for children.\nBelieve it or not, there is a country where these benefits are a reality.\nBeginning Tuesday, the Labor Studies Department will be offering a five-week course on Gender and Labor Studies in Sweden. Students will be welcome to join through next week.\nThe class will be taught by Per Nordahl, a visiting scholar and director of the Institute for Immigration Studies at Vaxjo University in Sweden. Nordahl, who speaks perfect English, is eager to teach IU students about beneficial policies regarding working parents in Sweden.\n"The mission is to give an understanding of how this situation came about," Nordahl said. "It would be beneficial to ground some of these good ideas into the students."\nThe Swedish government taxes 30 to 55 percent of income to pay for these programs. In return, most parents are able to spend at least the first two years at home with their newborn children. Government subsidies to daycare centers make it possible for parents to enroll a child at a maximum of $70 a month. The Swedish population mostly supports these policies.\nIn the United States, a third of workers do not qualify for their employers' childcare programs due to an inadequate amount of working hours or years on the job, said Lynn Duggan, assistant professor in the Division of Labor Studies. Also, most small businesses do not have childcare programs.\n"Nowhere in the Constitution does it require employers to give working parents anything," Duggan said. "In other countries, people believe they have the rights to benefits we would not dream of having the rights to."\nHaving experienced the Swedish system, Nordahl is confident that the class, though only five weeks long, will intrigue his students.\n"These programs represent another kind of quality," Nordahl said. "It is like a community. It is also important to get perspectives from other places and their societies. Diversity should be a blessing and not a burden or problem."\nThe class, L290/390, Gender and Labor Studies in Sweden, is joint-listed with Gender Studies as G302.