EH

I think we’re regarded as a very big threat on the labor market, not so much because we’ve been able to negotiate good work hours or good pay at the local levels in the port, but because we represent an alternative. There is growing disapproval of the way trade unions are run, more and more like insurance companies run by CEOs instead of rank-and-file involvement in the union as a whole. And the unions have a problem with this that they identify. They can’t even get people to accept the positions at the local level anymore. But they still don’t change any of the structures that made this outcome come to be in the first place.

We’re very small compared to the Swedish labor market as a whole. Dockworkers are less than 3,000 in the whole country. It’s a very small profession and we’re a very small union — about half of the dockworkers are organized with us, about half are with the other union, the Transport Workers Union. But for some reason, the fact that we still exist and that we still keep talking about these old but new structures where we still have these membership votes and we still elect whomever we want to office instead of someone who would be loyal to the top level or a paid official, for some reason, it’s kind of threatening, both to the employers — though I think less to the employers — and more for the top-level of the LO.

The origin of our current problem is the APM dispute. The APM dispute was a local dispute which happened a few years after the Port of Gothenburg, which is the biggest port in Scandinavia, was privatized. It was taken over by APM, which is owned by Maersk. Maersk appointed a new CEO with a different agenda that was very anti-union. He was brought in to just fuck everything up: terms and conditions, pay, everything. He was brought in to do this and he met resistance from us. And this resulted in a local dispute that ended with a lockout in 2017 where we were locked out for six weeks and after that, a third of the workforce was fired and replaced by temp agency workers. The issue is still not resolved. It’s an ongoing problem.

During that period, APM tried to broaden the dispute to involve all the other ports and all the other operators. And they failed. A letter was sent out by the employers’ association in 2017 for all terminal operators to exercise the same policies towards the Swedish Dockworker Union as APM. That meant that the SDU should denied all information on what was happening in the company. We were to be thrown out from all negotiations. At APMT, they tried to threaten our union reps. And they got rid of all the elected health and safety officers who were members of the Swedish Dockworkers Union. They could do that in accordance with the law. Essentially, APMT just dumped the informal compromise that had been in effect ever since the big strikes in 1974 and 1980 and we were thrown out. The problem for APM and their supporters at that time, was that the other port companies wouldn’t comply with their policy towards the SDU.

In 2018, they tried again to broaden the dispute, this time with the support of the national employers’ association for all industries. With their support, they sent out a new letter to all companies in the ports saying that if the policy was not executed to the letter then the company would be thrown out of the employers’ association which would be a big problem for these companies, in the Swedish context. It could mean that the ports might be boycotted by members of the employers’ association in general which would mean devastating economic loss. So at that point, in April last year, all of them complied. And dockworkers were thrown out of more negotiations and health and safety work in all the ports.

Since then, we’ve tried to negotiate a solution in order to regain those rights. But we recognize that this time, a compromise like the one made after the strike in 1980 would not be possible. This time, we need to win a real CBA in order to ensure that we actually have the rights of a normal trade union in Sweden. So that’s what the dispute is about.

Basically, our demand is to sign a CBA parallel with the one already in place, with the same wording, the same wage scales, the same work-pattern rules, etc., as the one between ports in Sweden and the Swedish Transport Workers Union. But this poses a threat to a lot of different actors. The LO does not want us to be a fully recognized stakeholder in the CBA because they regard us as competitors. The LO has an internal decision that there can only be one trade union in each profession and the LO has the final word on which union organizes which profession. As they have already given that right to the Transport Workers Union, we are kind of an abomination, something really bad, intruding on their territory.

The employers, on the other hand, think we’re a pain in the ass that they want to get rid of. They know that if they get rid of the Swedish Dockworkers Union then they will not have to handle, for example, international solidarity action in the ports. We’ve been taking action with the rest of the International Dockworkers Council, for example, in support of British dockworkers in Tilbury, or the Portuguese dockworkers. And they would get rid of all that if they got rid of us. They would also get a counterpart that was much easier to handle. And I think they see the potential to erode the working conditions of the whole dockworker force over time if we are not at the negotiation table.

Since this was a coordinated effort last year, I think they’ve been preparing some kind of joint tactics to make this happen. We’ve been trying for eight months to negotiate a solution, but we’re still getting the same counterproposal as we have for the last ten years, which is that we should have a side agreement to the Transport Workers Union’s agreement. That would mean that our union would be subordinate to the other union. That in turn would mean that we would not be present at negotiations at all. We would be receiving paid union time for doing nothing, which might be very nice for one or two people but would basically make the whole union redundant. There’s no point in having a rank-and-file democracy or a rank-and-file union if we’re not part of negotiations, doing basic union work where our members are. We’re not interested in doing anything else, being a kind of PR organization or becoming another insurance company.