Strategies for optimism - the story of the Swedish labour movement

Strategies for optimism: The story of the Swedish labour movement Speakers: Geoff Dow & Winton Higgins 

An Evatt Foundation seminar

The Swedish labour movement has proved to be the West’s most successful — industrially, politically and socially. In the past, this success has been put down to the ‘Swedish model’, as if this was a transplantable technocratic wonder. The true story is that the Swedish labour movement’s success crowned a deliberate strategy devised by Ernst Wigforss to discredit economic liberalism and disperse those who peddled it, while creating an enduring social-democratic electoral majority that was underpinned by the development of trade union activism as a formidable presence at the point of production. Through heavy investment in research, Sweden’s peak trade union body became the main incubator of economic policy.

In this seminar, Winton Higgins and Geoff Dow will explain the dynamics of the union and party mobilisation that brought the Swedish strategy to fruition. They will present a political economy-based analysis to show how a similar strategy could work just as well today, a time ripe for fresh approaches in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. The Evatt Foundation invites you to join the discussion about whether a version of the Swedish strategy could be developed in Australia today.

WINTON HIGGINS is a graduate of the Universities of Sydney, Stockholm and London and currently a research fellow at the University of Technology, GEOFF DOW is a reader in political economy and political science at the University of Queensland.

Event Cost:

Free/donation

RSVP:

admin@evatt.usyd.edu.au or phone 0412 803 457 (Bruce Childs)