‘Don’t be afraid of the bosses, they should be afraid of us’ – a power resource analysis of a successful union organising on local trains in Sweden

Abstract

During the 2000s, in Sweden, as in other European countries, the transport sector that once was public owned has been subjected to neoliberal privatisation. The involvement of private actors in public transport entails changes in industrial relations, which have impact in the workplace. In this paper, though a power recourse lens, we discuss a multifaceted labour dispute that occurred 2018 to 2021 between Arriva (now VR Sverige), the private company that runs the regional train service in the Swedish southern region of Skåne, and the local trade union club Klubb Pågatåg, affiliated with the blue-collar trade union federation Seko (Service- och Kommunikationsfacket). Started in conjunction with the negotiations for renewing the local collective agreement initially set for April 2020, the dispute became sharper following the decision of the company to implement a business plan contemplating the redefinition of individual terms of employment for all employees and, later, the attempt to fire the local trade union health and safety representative appointed by Klubb Pågatåg who confronted that decision. By relying on interviews, observations, online material as well as legal documents analysis, we discuss the significance of the 2020–2021 Pågatåg and the capacity of a local trade union to successfully engage in a dispute by mobilising associational power resources even against institutional constraints. In line with global trends, our paper shows the strength of logistics workers (broadly conceived) in attempting to change power relations on the labour market through local union organising.