What does the bankruptcy mean for Northvolt employees with work permits?
Northvolt has approximately 5,000 employees in Sweden, including a large number of third country nationals with work permits based on their employment with the company.
The bankruptcy of a large company like Northvolt is an unusual situation, and the scale of this one surpasses anything the Swedish Migration Agency has dealt with before. As a general rule, employees of companies that go bankrupt keep their jobs until they are dismissed and the notice period has expired.
People with a residence permit in Sweden based on employment that is terminated normally have three months to find a new job, calculated from the day the notice period expires. After that, their work permit can be revoked if there are no new grounds for granting them a residence permit.
There are currently 1,650 granted work permits for which Northvolt is listed as the employer in the application. However, the Swedish Migration Agency cannot say how many of these employees are still with the company, because employees are not always bound to a particular employer. Some people may therefore have moved on to other employers. Others may have been dismissed without their work permit having yet been revoked.
Following last autumn’s layoffs at Northvolt, the Swedish Migration Agency followed up on the 350 people who had been made redundant who had work permits based on their employment there. Some of them have left the country, around 100 have applied for new residence permits, around 60 have been granted new residence permits, and more than 80 temporary residence permits are currently subject to revocation. As yet, no decisions have been made to revoke any of these former Northvolt employees’ residence and work permits.
As regards people with open applications pertaining to work at Northvolt, their cases will be handled once the employment situation has been clarified. This applies to both first-time applications and extension applications.
– These cases can no longer be considered complete, as the bankruptcy trustee has now taken over the company’s assets. How they will be handled in the future depends on how the bankruptcy proceedings play out – but we are of course following developments here and are in contact with the bankruptcy trustee, says Swedish Migration Agency official Hanna Geurtsen, who is leading the work of processing the cases.
If you change employer or profession or stop working when you have a permit to work in Sweden
You are waiting for a decision about an extension to work in Sweden