نبذة مختصرة : Over the past 50 years, labour unions have gone from being a central organizing principle, to a marginalized aspect of Swedish society. Once wielding massive political and social influence, they are now unable to seriously impact the contemporary political landscape - let alone exercise meaningful influence over how the masses live their lives. This vacating of influence by organized labour, left the door open for market interests to control the course of our collective destiny. In previous studies, this process has been imagined in a multitude of ways: as the uninterruptable, inevitable course of market consolidation; as a failure of the socialist project; as the betrayal of the working class. Here, the process of labour union collapse is imagined as a product of economic hardship striking at working class networks that were already cracking under the pressure of social change – starting in the 1970s. During this period, local union organizations, the basic form of working-class organization, start to lose control over their members. By applying a comparative perspective to the local expressions of this process in Sweden’s two biggest unions – Kommunal and Metall – this paper argues that the 1970’s was indeed characterized by significant social, and organizational challenges for Swedish organized labour, which would set the tone for its eventual strong decline in the mid-1980s.
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