Trade Union Victories after the Pandemic

Across Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic put care workers on the corona frontline of an underfinanced, understaffed and undervalued care sector. This report is a follow-up to a series of reports that described the conditions of elder care workers during the first wave of the pandemic that the FES Nordic Countries produced and published in cooperation with Arena Idé and the Swedish trade union Kommunal in 2021. Representatives from academia and the trade union sector from nine different countries was involved and altogether nine country studies and one summary report were published. The series showed, how years of austerity policies and neoliberal new public management have increased the level of privatisation and precarisation, and decreased the rate of unionization in the elder care sector. But also, the victories and importance of trade union work during the crises.  

On March 24^th, 12-13 there will be a Swedish online release-event of the report with the author Lisa Pelling, Head of the thinktank Arena Idé and Malin Ragnegård, Chairperson of the Swedish trade union Kommunal. 

Sign up to join the event here!

The report is written by Lisa Pelling, Head of the think tank Arena Idé, and is a cooperation with Arena Idé and trade union Kommunal.

The report is based on contributions from a two day roundtable in 2022 at the headquarters of Kommunal in Stockholm, Sweden with the following panel contributors:

Mari Huuponen, Care Expert, Kommunal
Ingvar Skjerve, Advisor, Fagforbundet
Anne Mari Samskott, Advisor, Fagforbundet
Charlotte Bredal, senior consultant, working environment, FOA
Amalie Dam-Hansen, consultant, health policy, FOA
Dave Watson, Independent researcher
Gerry Mitchell, Social policy researcher
Barbara Susec, Union Secretary for Care Policy, Ver.di
Manuel Pereira-Puga, Researcher, Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CSIC)
Jorge Hernández-Moreno, Doctoral researcher, Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP-CSIC)
Daniel Carolo, Researcher, Institute of Public Policy