Yes, you are entitled to benefits from your unemployment insurance fund according to the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Act, assuming of course that you fulfil the terms and prerequisites to qualify for unemployment insurance. Frilans Finans applies the Trade Organisation of Umbrella Companies www.egenanstallning.org overall assessment: umbrella employed as a contractor in combination with unemployment benefits.
In order that your unemployment insurance fund will be able to make a proper assessment of you as an employee, the following points are important.
We can help you with filling in forms and questionnaires from your unemployment insurance fund. Before contact is made with your unemployment insurance fund, we recommend that you always contact Administration at Frilans Finans for information and advice, so that you know how you what you should do.
Attached below you will find information from the Trade Organisation of Umbrella Companies.
Information from the Trade Organisation of Umbrella Companies – Umbrella Employed in combination with Unemployment Insurance
Preconditions
Currently, there is a great deal of uncertainty among the unemployment insurance fund administrators concerning how the rules in the Unemployment Insurance Act should be interpreted. A further complicating factor is that according to the Unemployment Insurance Act your unemployment insurance fund is not allowed to not provide an advance decision. The difficulty the administrators at the unemployment insurance funds have in interpreting the law is due to that it was written and designed for a labour market that has fundamentally changed since it was written. Stated in more simplified terms, one could say that the law is written from a situation (and presumption) in which people worked at the same place year in and year out, and that the individual employee could be controlled in purely physical terms. Today the majority of people are working with some form of personal responsibility over their job/employment, and the unemployment insurance fund quite simply finds it difficult to relating to the fact that the worker has their own responsibility, since according to the Unemployment Insurance Act entrepreneurs are holders personal responsibility and that in the main entrepreneurs are entitled to the unemployment insurance benefits only in special cases.
So the conclusion is, in order to be eligible for compensation from the unemployment insurance fund, you should as an employee have as little as possible own responsibility and be placed under the employer’s direction. The Trade Association of Umbrella Companies’ member companies responds to this legal requirement via advance registration, which means that you report in when, where and with what you are going to be working with to your umbrella company before the work commences. The pre-registration is done in your umbrella company’s own system, e-mail address, etc. and most preferably by that the customer signs your umbrella company’s standard contract (open as PDF) for the purchase of services: Frilans Finans standard contract. Frilans Finans Standard Agreement . Also see “How do I make an advance registration of an invoice?”
Subordination – the most fundamental evaluation criterion
When you make a pre-registration, this means in the employment law that sense that you as an employee are initiating a job that your umbrella company controls, as the law requires: the nature of the work, time and location. Based on these conditions, your umbrella company then chooses to accept the assignment or to decline it.
This means that you as the employee are placed under the employer’s control, which in the legal sense is of importance because it indicates that you are an employee, or a non-independent contractor (non-independent service provider), and thus are potentially qualified receive to benefits from the unemployment insurance fund. The opposite relationship is an entrepreneur (owner of a company) or independent contractor.
Therefore in summary, it is important that you communicate to your administrator at your unemployment insurance fund that you initiate the work for your umbrella company, who after a decision to enter into the contract, verifies the nature of the work, time and location, and then offers an employment (to you). This way of organising work means that you are under the control of Frilans Finans and that Frilans Finans has the same rights and obligations as any other employer in Sweden.
Several assessment criteria
Below are some other criteria that are important for the unemployment insurance fund’s overall assessment of whether you to be regarded in the sense of unemployment insurance as an employee or non-independent service provider and thus are qualified to receive benefits from the unemployment insurance.
You, as an employee or non-independent service provider, are characterised in that you;
You have the right, under the Unemployment Insurance Act, to an overall assessment
According to the Unemployment Insurance Act, your unemployment insurance fund is not allowed to not provide an advance decision. However, they are required to make an overall assessment of the facts when they examine whether you are eligible to receive benefits from the unemployment insurance.
Some things to consider
In order to be clear vis-à-vis your administrator at the unemployment insurance fund, remember that in the employment law legal sense you are employed, and therefore avoid words or entrepreneurial concepts such as e.g. invoice, customer, do it on my own, etc.
Is the Swedish government doing something to adapt the law to today’s reality?
Former Minister for Employment Hillevi Engström was well aware of the problems with the legislation, and the Ministry of Employment’s press release of 2 October 2010 speaks about that there is great legal uncertainty for individuals. Then-Administration then issued a supplementary directive concerning establishing clear and predictable rules for contractors/service providers within the framework of the Social Insurance Investigatory Commission which should have been presented on 1 January, 2015. The Social Insurance Investigatory Commission report was presented in March 2015, and it does not contain any concrete proposals for clarification of the rules.
Övriga frågor