The work environment email alerts launch a couple of weeks ago has gone great. It's operating really smoothly now and delivering email alerts to way more people than I dreamed would sign up this early. So I'm moving to the next phase, which begins today.

Linked here is an English translation of chapter 6, section 6a of the Swedish Work Environment Act. This is the law that 666a is named after. Until today the English version of it hasn't had its own URL. You could link to PDFs containing it somewhere on page 15, or pages that mention it in passing, but there was no way to send your English-speaking colleague a convenient link to it to help them understand their rights.

The data entry work that's gone into creating this resource was gruelling. The reason it was worth the trouble is simple. I saw first-hand during the Spotify campaign how the absence of this kind of resource is a strategic weakness for Sweden's labour movement, with its dreams of organising the country's influential tech immigrant workforce.

People move to this country to work in tech. Sweden's bursting with cool international employers whose company language is English. So you get off the plane on Saturday, unpack on Sunday, roll into the office on Monday and just get started. No language barrier, everything's in perfect English.

Later that week you stop by the bank during lunch to try to open an account. Not so easy. The person helping you speaks great English, but the forms are in Swedish. It takes longer than expected and makes you return late from lunch. Right from the start, your new life in Sweden is defined by this contrast between the comfort and familiarity provided by your employer and the friction and inconvenience of Swedish society at large. It's a barrier to integration.

Ten years ago, the Swedish government produced unofficial English translations of key laws. These were published as PDFs on government.se, where they remain to this day. The laws themselves have been updated repeatedly since then, but not all the translations have been updated to match. To a lawyer, the failure to maintain such an important resource might seem like the headline problem. But in tech culture, it's actually the PDF thing.

It's impossible to send someone a link to a specific part of a PDF, which means sending a colleague a link to e.g. section 11 of the Co-determination Act in English is impossible. You have to send them the PDF link and tell them "scroll down to xyz" instead. Many people won't.

And the dominant mobile device among this demographic – the iPhone – provides no immediate means of generating a machine translation if you send someone a link to a resource in Swedish. They can copy-paste the text into Google Translate if they're really keen. But many people won't.

The experience of receiving a PDF link is worse too. A web page will usually have metadata configured so that a link pasted into a chat platform such as WhatsApp or Slack will appear with a short description or excerpt of the page's content. PDFs can't do this, so on most platforms you just see a bare link instead and have to make a leap of faith that it might contain something useful. Many people won't.

This friction is a serious barrier to increasing engagement. Tech people live on the internet in a way that politicians and lawyers just don't. In our interactions with online services we perceive subtle signs of value or quality or trustworthiness that people who are less terminally online might not.

Starting today, 666a is taking one of those decade-old translations and hosting it as proper linkable web content. You can browse the full text of the Work Environment Act in Swedish and English side by side. And when you find the section you're looking for, you can grab its URL for bookmarking or sharing. So finally there's a way to send someone a link to chapter 6 section 6a in English.

The decision to include the original Swedish alongside the unofficial English translation is deliberate too. Those little moments of exposure will help grow your vocabulary. Integration isn't just about spoon-feeding us translations forever. Any immigrant's long-term goal is always language acquisition. Thoughtful design choices in services we depend on can support that long-term goal even as we focus on solving our short-term everyday problems.

I'll repeat this process for more laws over the coming weeks. There are some particularly important ones that are my top priority, like the Co-Determination Act and the Employment Protection Act. Please do email me at henry@666a.se and let me know if there's one you think is important not to miss.

My big dream for this feature would be to secure some funding from somewhere to spend on updating all the translations. I think there's almost limitless potential here. For example, I would absolutely love to commission professional Arabic translations of all these laws and host them right here alongside the English ones. I'm convinced that meeting immigrants where we are is the way to make us feel seen and wanted, and inspire us to engage more with Swedish society.

But first things first. Here's an English copy of the Work Environment Act that's ten years out of date.