ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the neoliberalization of industrial relations across the Nordic countries. It argues that there are both universal and Nordic-specific characteristics of neoliberalization, the former serving to constrain employer discretion while the latter to reorient industrial relations institutions away from reproducing Fordist growth towards non-wage-led growth models, and in the process undermining core solidaristic elements of the postwar Nordic model. A combination of changes to Nordic growth models and more interventionist states, undermining the self-regulating character of these industrial relations systems, has transformed them over the last three decades. While Nordic industrial relations today do not look like those of more conventionally neoliberalized political economies, and even allowing for differences across the Nordics, the Nordic models of today are quite different from those of the 1970s, and on all dimensions those differences have been along a trajectory of greater neoliberalization.
