Leadership Quote by Goran Persson

A politician doesn’t reach for “more human” unless something has already been allowed to become machine-like. Goran Persson’s line reads less like a slogan about kindness than a diagnosis of an economy drifting toward cold efficiency: longer hours, tighter metrics, downsizing dressed up as modernization, and the quiet expectation that people should absorb stress like infrastructure. “Working life” is a telling phrasing. It frames labor not as a job you clock in and out of, but as a life-domain that can be deformed or dignified by policy.

The intent is broad enough to build a coalition. Employers can hear productivity through sustainability; unions can hear protection; exhausted white-collar workers can hear boundaries. That’s the political skill here: “human” is morally loaded without being technically binding. It implies that existing conditions have crossed a line, yet it avoids naming culprits, which keeps the statement usable in negotiation.

The subtext is classic late-20th-century social democracy: markets may allocate, but governments set the terms under which people are used up. Persson, leading Sweden through an era shaped by fiscal restraint, EU integration, and workplace restructuring, is also signaling that welfare-state ideals aren’t only about safety nets after the damage. They’re about redesigning the daily experience of earning a living - stress, autonomy, family time, dignity on the job - before the damage becomes permanent.

It works because it smuggles an ethical claim into administrative language: if work is where adulthood happens, then making it “human” is not charity. It’s governance.