Today, companies that have a collective bargaining agreements with their workers pay 0.3 percent of their payroll annually into the job-security council that works with people in their sector. There’s a job-security council for white-collar workers, for instance, one for government workers, one for blue-collar workers, one for people in the arts. When a company is going to lay off workers, it alerts the job-security council, which comes to the company and tells the workers about the services it offers. Workers are matched with a counselor, and depending on their age and the amount of time they’ve worked with the company, they also receive a stipend from the job-security council that helps defray costs. For those older than 40, the stipends can be quite generous.

The services provided by TRR and other job-security councils are much more robust than those provided by the government through the unemployment office. “The difference is that the unemployment center doesn’t have the same muscles as us, they don't have the resources,” Ulrika Wiklund, the region chief of TRR in Norrkoping, told me. Counselors meet with clients weekly if necessary, Elisabeth Ramel, a counselor with TRR, told me. They also have a large pool of money that they can use to pay for retraining courses, which they can dispense if they think a certain resource will help someone. Ramel once helped a laid-off Ericsson worker who was sick of tech find coursework that helped him move into the music industry. Counselors don’t push people towards professions that are in demand, like health care, for instance, if the person isn’t interested, Ramel said. They instead try to find what the person wants to do and would enjoy. “You kind of help them to find their own strengths,” Ramel told me. The personal attention makes a huge difference to people’s outcomes, she said. Ramel will ask clients questions about themselves—what they’re good at, and what they like to do, for example—that they often haven’t thought about for a long time

Helene Ljungqvist has used TRR twice in her career, once when she got laid off from Ericsson in 2006, and then again when she got laid off from an electrical company in 2013. The most recent time she used TRR, a close friend had just died and Ljungqvist was struggling emotionally, and wasn't sure she’d find a new job. But her counselor served as a therapist of sorts, introducing her to meditation as she took courses to get retrained for a new job. “You can be upset, if you lose your work and you are sad, and they are calm and they understand,” she said. “You can talk to them, even if you are sad or angry.” Ljungqvist now asks potential employers if they are covered by TRR when she is considering taking a new job, to be sure she’ll be provided for if layoffs come.

The existence of firms such as TRR may seem odd to people in other countries, where it might be a challenge to get employers to pay into a fund to help the workers they’ve laid off. But job-security councils are good for employers, too, because they make unions more willing to accede to layoffs, said Carina Lindfelt, the chief of the department of labor markets at the Confederation of Swedish Employers, which is the employers’ association. “It’s easy to have those negotiations, since you know on both sides that these people that will be laid off will get such professional support,” she said. Employers also feel less personally guilty about doing layoffs because of the existence of job-security councils, she said.