Negotiating about Algorithms: Social Partner Responses to AI in Denmark and Sweden

Digitalization in the Nordics -towards AI-based solutionsThe Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland) are some of the most digitalized societies in the world (European Commission 2022; UN 2020).Denmark and Sweden rank at the very top in international comparisons and this development has been driven by a high degree of digitalization in the public sector, motivating citizens and companies to digitalize.More than 90 percent of citizens and companies interact with the public authorities digitally via online platforms in Denmark, Sweden and Finland (European Commission 2022).Investments in digital infrastructure (e.g., broadband coverage) has supported the digital development and has paved the way for digitizing the private sector.In 2012, six large banks in Sweden launched the digital payment solution Swish, which is now widely used.Similar digital payment solutions are Mobilepay in Denmark and Finland (launched by Danske Bank in 2013) and Vipps in Norway (launched by DNB in 2015).Today, many Nordic citizens shop online and have basic digital skills and many companies utilize e-commerce solutions (European Commission 2022).The high degree of digitalization in both the public and private sectors has paved the way for the introduction of AI-based solutions, which has happened faster in the Nordics than elsewhere (European Commission 2022).However, the usage of AI differs slightly across the Nordic countries.Denmark takes the lead among the Nordic countries with 24 percent of companies using AI technologies compared to 16 per cent of Swedish and 10 per cent of Finnish companies (European Commission 2022).The use of AI takes place in a context of the so-called Nordic labour market model.The model combines, in varying ways, an extensive welfare state with a voluntarist system of collective bargaining (Andersen et al. 2014;Kjellberg 2023).A core feature of this model is close coordination between social partners (government, unions and employers' associations), which is strong at national, industry and local levels (ibid.).This multi-level governance secures a stable, flexible and dynamic regulation of the Nordic labour markets, with comparatively high collective bargaining coverage and union densities (OECD, 2023;Kjellberg, 2023).In this article, we focus on social partner responses to AI in Denmark and Sweden, as these countries not only represent the two largest and most digitalized countries in the Nordics, but they also the most similar labour market models in the Nordic context with extensive use of collective bargaining and no tradition of legal extension of collective agreements.However, labour law plays a slightly more prominent role in Sweden than in Denmark through the Employment Protection Act and the Co-determination Act (both from the 1970s, but with significant revisions as recently as 2022) (Ilse & Larsen 2021).