Ten of twelve public companies failed duties to prevent ethnic and religious discrimination.
Equality law requires continuous preventive work. Public ownership did not make compliance automatic.
Ten of twelve publicly owned companies failed Sweden's legal requirements for preventing discrimination linked to ethnicity and religion. In the DO review, only two met the standard. Public ownership did not guarantee public standards.
The law does not ask employers to wait for a complaint. It requires continuous “active measures”: investigate risks, analyse causes, take action, then follow up and evaluate the result. Ten companies failed that test in DO's review.
This is not a finding that every company discriminated against an employee. It is a finding about whether the organisations had done the structured preventive work the law requires. That distinction makes the result more, not less, relevant to management. Prevention is the part employers control before an individual has to prove harm.
DO plans to follow the companies' work in 2027. That gives boards and owners time to repair the systems, but it should not turn compliance into a two-year aspiration.
For international staff, religious minorities and anyone whose name or background affects how they are read at work, equal treatment cannot depend on a manager's good intentions. A public company should be able to show where bias could enter recruitment, pay, promotion and working conditions, and what it did about it.
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