Kampen om välfärdsarbetets värde : Fackligt aktiva kommunalare minns strejken 2003

The tertiary sector accounts for a rising share of labour disputes, making studies of public sector strikes increasingly relevant to the understanding of labour market power relations. With the intention of exploring conditions for public sector labour struggles, this study aims to empirically examine the extensive 2003 wage strike carried out by the Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union [Kommunal]. It also seeks to theoretically discuss the Kommunal strike as a struggle over the value of public sector labour and as an arena for collective mobilisation and subject formation. Three questions have guided the research process: 1) What knowledge of the strike is conveyed through the experiences of Kommunal representatives? 2) What did strike participation mean for the formation of individual and collective subjectivity? 3) How can an exploration of municipal workers’ strike experiences contribute to a deeper understanding of how matters of justice are articulated in class-based struggle for social change? The method used is oral history, informed by feminist standpoint theory. Thirteen interviews were conducted with Kommunal activists and officials involved in the strike, predominantly at the local level. The interviews were complemented by contextualising texts, mainly from trade union press. The analysis has been carried out using Marxist and feminist perspectives on labour, class and gender relations and social change. The study finds that the meaning of the strike widely transcended the demands for higher wages. Striking enabled changes in subjectivity and generated new horizons of possibilities – a process analysed using the concept of cultures of solidarity. Such cultures were shaped by the intertwined aspiration for recognition and redistribution, rooted in the particular character and preconditions of public sector labour. Because the interviewees perceive their value as workers as linked to their value as human beings, and because this sense of value is in turn tied to their claim for the valorisation of the welfare state and of public service users, recognition and redistribution emerge in a co-constitutive relationship. The thesis presents new knowledge about public sector unionism. It illustrates that the difference between service work and the production of goods, as well as between the public and private sector, are central dimensions in the exploration of workers’ strike experiences, and hence for developing understandings of subjectivity in labour strife. The thesis also shows that a binary division between recognition and redistribution is problematic when the point of departure is municipal workers’ conceptualisations of social justice, and argues that recognition needs to be reintroduced into analysis of class struggle