What is it actually about?' Asymmetric mobilisation and the defeat of wage-earner fund policies in Sweden

Neil Warner

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: ‘Wage-earner funds’, an ultimately-defeated idea for union-controlled funds to develop stakes in Swedish companies, dominated Swedish politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are regularly cited as a prominent attempt to introduce economic democracy. However, factors behind the funds’ defeat are often under-analysed, with the sequencing of events particularly neglected. This article corrects for this. It seeks to explain the defeat of wage-earner funds by tracing decision-making processes in the Social Democratic Party. It argues that the funds were defeated due to asymmetries in mobilisation, which were connected to asymmetries in everyday experiences. While capital owners mobilised strongly against wage-earner funds as an existential threat, most Social Democratic leaders, voters and union members saw the issue as detached from their everyday concerns. This points to the importance that asymmetries in experience and mobilisation can have in policy contests, which provides an advantage to capital in contests over investment control.

Keywords: employee ownership; policy resonance; Social Democratic parties; Sweden; trade unions; wage-earner funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 J1 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2025-05-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economic and Industrial Democracy, 3, May, 2025. ISSN: 0143-831X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/127873/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:127873

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().