Public service employees testify about discrimination and racism

This weekend, Expressen published a long report in which nine public service employees, past and present, describe racism in the workplace.

The people interviewed work for both SVT and Swedish Radio.

The report comes just under a month after 39 employees at SR wrote a petition against racism within the company.

The call criticized news evaluation, work environment and recruitment.

- The interesting thing is that they fail despite recurring diversity seminars where not only the lack of diversity among the staff is problematized but also among the listeners.

SR even has a target group that they internally call "non-listeners", says Ametist Azordegan, music journalist, to Expressen.

"Services have passed me by"

Pia Herrera, who has worked at SVT for 13 years, describes that she finds it difficult to talk about diversity issues in general.

- Some have refused to make me up or even touch my hair.

There is a lot of talk about "we" and "them" and often I have felt annihilated.

Services have wrongly passed me by and managers have also acknowledged this in retrospect.

Arash Mokhtari previously worked at SVT Nyheter and Kulturnyheterna.

He tells Expressen that he has been harassed by a colleague and not taken seriously by the HR department.

- The last thing that happened was that my cupboard was vandalized.

Then they offered me to remove my name on the locker, but I did not accept it.

Everyone else had their name on the cupboard.

I would have liked managers to speak loudly about this kind of shit happening on SVT.

"One trip left to do"

Andreas Bedinger, division manager for the program division at SVT, does not want to comment on individual HR cases, but points out that a good work environment is important for achieving the goals of a public service that is for everyone.

- Of course, we at SVT should be very humble if people point out that they have experienced that HR, managers or company management have not acted and marked.

We must take that information very seriously.

It is a fundamental, important feeling when you go to work, he says.

The article in Expressen made him depressed, and he thinks it is sad that SVT has not come any further.

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There are too many who testify that we have come too short a way with inclusion.

There we have a journey to make, both in how we recruit and in our range.

We must dare to admit that.

But I feel that the will to achieve the goal of reflecting the whole of Sweden exists and that our activities and strategies regarding culture, recruitment and how we work with the range, are starting to be more clearly connected between several parts of the company, which makes me hopeful.