ABSTRACT
The Swedish union movement has often been taken as the archetype of political unionism, that is, of a union tradition that goes well beyond the ambit of unions’ conventionally limited socio-economic role, and that abandons western union movements’ normal political deference towards their affiliated political parties. Political unionism can also entail transcending sectional interest in favour of universalistic values, such as the pursuit of equality and a democratic associational life in all spheres of social practice. As early as the late 1940s the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) broke away from the tutelage of the Social Democratic Party, that originally spawned it six decades earlier, when it began to incubate the Rehn-Meidner Model (Higgins, 1985). That model not only lay the basis for the whole labour movement’s subsequent approach to public economic management; it was the core element of ‘the Swedish model’ for postwar economic development up to the early 1980s, and the social priorities, institutions and mobilizing rhetoric of labour that it fostered remain highly visible today. Swedish unionism has maintained a direct and independent role in public policy formation ever since. Without political unionism, the internationally impressive facade of Swedish social democracy would have been little more than that — a mere façade.
