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The verdict is in: Stockholm district court has decided that the Transport Union was in the wrong when they kicked out a paying member because he was active in the Sweden Democrats party.
Mats Fredlund was voted in to local office in Kiruna for the Sweden Democrats in 2018 while also being a member of the Transport Union. While many unions don’t allow active Sweden Democrats to hold union office, the Transport Union didn’t even want them as members. Transport’s union chief Lars Mikaelsson said at the time that while the union didn’t generally get involved in its members political affiliations, it wasn’t possible to be in the union while actively working against it.
Mats Fredlund took Transport to court and won. The court said that Fredlund’s activities in the party are not in contradiction with the union’s activities and that therefore they could not kick him out.
The Transport Union is a member of LO, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation. LO has traditionally been congenically connected to the Social Democratic party: Previously, if you were a member of LO you were automatically also an official member of the Social Democratic party. Nowadays, though, more members of LO support the Sweden Democrats than the Social Democrats, causing all sorts of sleepless nights for the traditionalists. The verdict opens for the possibility that the Sweden Democrats may start to exercise influence over LO the way the Social Democrats have done for decades.
Although that might not be a desired outcome by any other than SD members, the verdict can be considered correct by many. Being able to join organizations in Sweden (basically any and all) is considered a Swedish human right and is enshrined in the constitution as freedom of association (föreningsfriheten). Unions are considered to help and represent members in conflict with employers – if you’re kicked out of the union there is no one to represent you. The court said that having no one to represent you, because you were kicked out of the union, was unfair to the worker.
In something quite unique internationally, more civil servants (tjänstemän) in Sweden belong to a union (72%) than general workers (arbetare”). Only 59% of workers are in a union, and the numbers for some unions, like the hotel and restaurant union, are well below that. At the least, the verdict may cause some unions to reconsider and refine their role and work for the Swedish worker. Maybe a definition of their core task needs to be revisited.