Do public sector industrial relations challenge the Swedish model?

Abstract

This article discusses recent developments in public sector labour relations in Sweden from a historical, gender and power relations perspective. The main question is whether these trends challenge the established Swedish industrial relations system. Our point of departure – yet chronologically also the point of arrival – is the Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union, Kommunal’s, exit from the coordinated wage setting model within the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen, LO) in 2015/2016. The immediate reason was that Kommunal, representing one-third of the LO members, including many low-paid women, turned down the LO’s proposal on a general wage increase for low-wage groups. Instead, Kommunal urged to upgrade wages for a specific member group, the auxiliary nurses. This broke an almost uninterrupted 20-year-long period of labour market cooperation and coordination that was introduced in 1997 through the so-called Industry Agreement (Industriavtalet). This agreement was launched in the wake of the deep financial crisis in the early 1990s, and the neoliberal move towards a complete decentralization of pay negotiations. How should this move by Kommunal be interpreted? Why, and when, has the centralized system become a straitjacket for Kommunal, when for decades it seemingly was a precondition for both private and public union strength?

Key words:

• Public sector industrial relations
• collective bargaining
• The Swedish model
• male vs. female occupations discrepancies

Notes

1. Interview with national union representative at the Vision, Stockholm, October 2014.

2. To the curious reader: the first occupational group to form a nationwide trade union in Sweden was the typographers, also in 1886.

3. Interview with national union representative at the Vision, Stockholm, October 2014.

4. Interview with sociopolitical chief analyst at Kommunal, Stockholm, October 2014; interview with national union representative at the Vision, Stockholm, October 2014; and interview with President of the ST, Stockholm, April 2015.

5. Interview with national union representative at the Vision, Stockholm, October 2014.

6. 24,000 SEK = approximately 2500 EUR or 2100 GBP.