The changing meaning of wage bargaining in Sweden since the 1960s: A contextual approach to shifts in industrial relations

Sweden is renowned for its centralised wage bargaining system, which has been studied from the point of view of inflation, wage differentials and unemployment. This article studies media coverage of wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s–1960s and in the 2000s–2010s to investigate the social understanding of what the wage bargaining institutions are supposed to do. The results indicate that the operation of the wage bargaining system in the 2000s and of that in the postwar era are in fact understood very differently: while widely shared aims for wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s and 1960s were to a high degree formulated by the trade unions, trade union influence over the agenda was significantly weaker in the 2000s and 2010s, when external experts, not least from the financial sector, were to a much higher degree used to define and formulate what good bargaining outcomes would be.