Swedish Trade Union Confederation

Swedish Trade Union Confederation
Landsorganisationen i Sverige (LO)
Founded7 August 1898; 126 years ago (1898-08-07)
HeadquartersStockholm, Sweden
Location
Members
1.23 million
Key people
Johan Lindholm,[1] president
AffiliationsITUC, ETUC
Websitewww.lo.se

The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Swedish: Landsorganisationen i Sverige [ˈlânː(d)sɔrɡanɪsaˌɧuːnɛn iː ˈsvæ̌rjɛ] ⓘ; literally "The National Organisation in Sweden"), commonly referred to as LO (Swedish: [ˈɛ̂lːuː] ⓘ), is a national trade union centre, an umbrella organisation for fourteen Swedish trade unions that organise mainly "blue-collar" workers. The Confederation, which gathers around 1.5 million employees out of Sweden's 10 million people population, was founded in 1898 by blue-collar unions on the initiative of the 1897 Scandinavian Labour Congress and the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which almost exclusively was made up by trade unions.[2] In 2019 union density of Swedish blue-collar workers was 60%,[3] a decline by seventeen percentage points since 2006 when blue-collar union density was 77%. A strong contributing factor was the considerably raised fees to union unemployment funds in January 2007 made by the new centre-right government.[4][5]

  1. ^ Bohlin, Albin (20 May 2024). "Efter avhoppet: Byggnads ordförande vald till ny LO-boss". Altinget.se. Altinget. Retrieved 21 May 2024.
  2. ^ Torvald Karlbom Den svenska fackföreningsrörelsen, Stockholm: Tidens förlag, pp. 45-47
  3. ^ Yearly average in 2019. See Anders Kjellberg (2020) Kollektivavtalens täckningsgrad samt organisationsgraden hos arbetsgivarförbund och fackförbund, Department of Sociology, Lund University. Studies in Social Policy, Industrial Relations, Working Life and Mobility. Research Reports 2020:1, Appendix 3 (in English) Table A
  4. ^ Anders Kjellberg "The Decline in Swedish Union Density since 2007" Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies (NJWLS) Vol. 1. No 1 (August 2011), pp. 67-93
  5. ^ Anders Kjellberg and Christian Lyhne Ibsen (2016) "Attacks on union organizing: Reversible and irreversible changes to the Ghent-systems in Sweden and Denmark", in Trine Pernille Larsen and Anna Ilsøe (eds.)(2016) Den Danske Model set udefra - komparative perspektiver på dansk arbejdsmarkedsregulering, Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag, p. 292