Organizing the Labor Market : power, ideas, and institutions in wage formation, digital automation, and migration

Abstract: This dissertation focuses on power, organization, institutions, and ideas in Swedish labor relations. Composed of four self-contained research papers and an extensive summary chapter, it makes contributions to the fields of industrial relations, organization studies, and political economy. The first two papers employ institutional and organizational theory to explain the stability and legitimacy of the Industrial Norm System in Swedish wage co?ordination since 1997. Data consists of interviews with 43 top decision makers from labor unions, employers, politics, and government, as well as more than 11,000 pages of documents and quantitative data on wages, inflation, strikes, employment, and GDP. The findings imply that ideas and partial organization complement previous theoretical explanations of institutional stability in wage formation, which largely attribute stability to material and institutional factors. The third paper (co-authored) is a case study of the Swedish mining com?pany Boliden AB. Using process tracing, it explains how and why firms and unions at the local level can achieve mutually beneficial outcomes when imple?menting algorithmic systems for digital automation. With data collected from 26 in-depth interviews and pertinent documents, the paper finds that trust, sha?red goals, and macro- to micro-level power resources of labor unions constitute beneficial constraints that shape the outcomes of collective bargaining. The fourth paper identifies challenges that migration poses for labor unions, strategies they use to address these challenges, and reasons for low union density among foreign-born workers. Three types of challenges and four types of strategies are identified. Low union density among foreign-born workers is more related to institutional factors and labor market position, than to ethnicity orculture.The summary chapter discusses theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions, as well as policy implications and practical use of the findings. It also considers Swedish wage bargaining in the contexts of growing income inequality and debates about increasing institutional liberalization.