The Trade Union Confederation, Neoliberalism and the Emergence of an Ethno-racist Sweden: Is Trade Union Anti-racism Possible?

At the beginning of November 2022, the Swedish Transport Workers’ Union (hereafter referred to as Transport) lost a legal battle as the Swedish court decided that it is illegal to exclude politically active Sweden Democrats from union membership (Frisk, 2022). A representative of the Sweden Democrats (SD) appears happy and content on the TV screen and claims that no one is to be excluded because of political affiliation. The union’s role is to represent workers, continues the SD representative (SVT, 2022). Transport’s argument for exclusion was based on the SD not accepting its fundamental values concerning the equal value of all people. Transport also argued that freedom of association gives unions, as well as other civil society organisations, the right to choose who can be members. The legal battle also highlights one of the many forms of resistance that LO and its unions have employed through more than thirty years of organised racist successes, which is to confront a party that is perceived by many as a threat to democracy. Transport’s attempt to prevent the presence of SD activists in the union reflects the continuous, sometimes successful and occasionally courageous work that trade union activists, some women and/or racialised people have done and do to maintain and develop a socially critical ideology and practice for social justice, in which issues of feminism and more recently anti-racism have to some extent become visible.

This conflict illustrates an aspect of the dilemma faced by Swedish trade unions today, with more than 20 percent of the population voting for the ethno-racist party the SD in 2022. Regarding LO members, 27 percent voted for the SD in 2022, an increase from 24 percent in 2018 (the corresponding figure for those who identified as workers and voted for the SD was 29 percent in 2022 and 24 percent in 2018).¹ The SD, which despite normalisation, as most clearly expressed in the Tidö Agreement,² from its Nazi and racist roots, sometimes ideologically and politically exhibits an explicitly racist (and, according to some, proto-fascist) worldview. In it, migrants are to blame for virtually all of Sweden’s problems, with support from a “culturally Marxist” establishment (Thorén, 2015, p. 33, citing Jonsson, 2015). At the same time, the SD’s parliamentary voting record and cooperation with traditional right-wing parties show how the party has in practice increasingly abandoned its care-racist welfare policies, maintained its ethno-racism (the construction of racism through a combination of ethnicisation and racialisation) and embraced (though not fully) more and more neoliberal economic policies (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022).

The Trade Union Confederation, Neoliberalism and the Emergence of an Ethno-racist Sweden