Swedish Trade Unions and Migration: Challenges and Responses

Abstract

Sweden is an interesting case study of the challenges that migration can pose to industrial relations and trade unions. As a highly unionized country with strong labor market institutions, it has received large volumes of migrants in recent years. Yet Swedish unionization has dropped, especially among foreign-born workers. Migrants are normally hit hard by precarious employment conditions and unemployment, and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. This divide between native and foreign-born workers, both in terms of labor market conditions and unionization, presents a challenge for Swedish trade unions. Especially for blue-collar unions. Growing anti-immigration sentiment, diminished support for the center-left parties and increased support for the radical right, exacerbates these challenges. This chapter provides an overview of these developments. One insight is that foreign background does not seem to significantly explain differences in unionization: workers who are comparable in terms of age, gender, sector, class, place of residence, and form of employment, have roughly the same likelihood of being union members, whether they are foreign-born or not. This implies that differences in unionization do not seem to have cultural explanations to any sizeable extent but are rather explained by labor market sorting. Furthermore Swedish trade unions use a default-inclusion strategy that organizes all workers through the same mechanisms and into the same structures. The organizing principle behind this strategy is class and profession/sector, rather than ethnicity. The reason why this strategy has not succeeded may be due to institutional and structural factors, including reduced employment protection and unemployment benefits, ethnical labor market sorting, and employment uncertainty.