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Sara Eldén och Rasmus Ahlstrand: Precarious and informal work in Sweden

“Precarious and informal work in Sweden: The case of cleaning, construction and food-delivery work"

Welcome to GP Seminar 24th September! Sara Eldén och Rasmus Ahlstrand (LS):

Speakers

Sara Eldén has a PhD in sociology (Lund University), and is now professor at SKI, Malmö University. Her research has focused on how the Swedish welfare state in recent decades - through privatisation, dismantling, globalisation and precarious work - creates new inequalities linked to gender, class and ethnicity. She is the Swedish PI for the PrecaNord project.

Rasmus Ahlstrand obtained his PhD in sociology from Lund University, Sweden in 2022. His research involves labour studies, work organisation, labour process, and migrant worker precarity. He is currently a post-doc researcher in an interdisciplinary Nordic project – “Tackling precarious and informal work in the Nordic countries (PrecaNord)”.

PrecaNord: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/tackling-precarious-and-informal-work-in-the-nordic-countries

Abstract

Sweden and its Nordic neighbours have for the last four or five decades served as an international benchmark in research on the welfare state, labour markets, and industrial relations. Paradoxically, throughout the same period, the Nordic models have been under severe pressure from the changing character of global capitalism. The intensification of capital and labour mobility have structurally effected labour relations and altered power-relations in favour of employers. Such processes weakens the position of workers in the labour market, specifically those involved in precarious and low-wage work.


Through the concept of labour regime (Baglioni et al., 2022), and based on ethnography and interviews, we explore processes of informalisation and precarisation among workers involved in low-wage segments of three industries in the Swedish labour market – cleaning, construction, and food-delivery work. In this presentation we focus on cleaning and construction specifically, and present research in progress. We analyse the implementation of the RUT-tax deduction system and its effect on labour relations in the cleaning sector, and also, we discuss the mobilisation of migrant workers by the syndicalist trade union SAC, arguing that these mobilisation efforts are groundbreaking in a Swedish context.

• Baglioni E, Campling L, Mezzadri A, et al. (2022) Exploitation and Labour Regimes: Production, Circulation, Social Reproduction, Ecology. Labour Regimes and Global Production. Agenda Publishing.

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