For the past

Workers in Sweden today owe their good working conditions to the country’s strong labour movement. A century of worker power has carved high expectations of working conditions into the bedrock of Swedish culture.

There exist rare cases today where workers without collective agreements receive benefits such as paid parental leave anyway. Even then, those workers are indirectly profiting from the strength of the labour movement which made those benefits commonplace. Organised labour is such a driving force in Sweden that employers still have to compete with the collectively bargained compensation offered by their competitors even if their own employees haven’t organised yet.

It took decades upon decades to build what we have today in Sweden. Many hundreds of thousands of people made untold sacrifices along the way. This is an important and successful social project spanning multiple generations. It’s something we should be enormously proud of and work to maintain.

For the present

Hard times are here. Cost-cutting and layoffs are everyday things right now. I broadly trust the people I work for, but there’s no collective agreement in place. I believe my employer’s intentions are good, but now is no time for wishful thinking. Now is the time to stand eye-to-eye as adults and make written, legally binding commitments.

I’m from a part of the world where union power was decimated by Thatcherism. Organising is still possible in the UK and groups like UTAW are proof of what’s possible. But the idea of a country where two thirds of the population are union members almost sounds like fantasy to someone like me. We have real power in our hands, right here and now. The question is whether we can find the will to use it.

While we’re deciding that, a newly elected right wing government is beginning the process of defunding key state institutions and social programs. The labour movement in Sweden has played an important role as a hedge against the slow unraveling of the welfare state since the 90s, and now is no exception. If you have private health insurance, for example, now would be an especially bad time to lose it.

For the future

My children will grow up in Sweden. One day they’ll need jobs. If the legacy of the boomers is that of a kind of asshole generation, pulling up the ladder behind themselves, I want my generation’s to be the opposite. I've seen first-hand what a weak labour movement and years of right wing cuts do to a country and I don't want my kids to have to work on zero-hour contracts at Biff's Pleasure Paradise. I want to pay forward with interest what workers in Sweden fought for over the course of the past century.

The future’s uncertain. The rise of remote work and the platform economy - both of which are trends my employer is a key driver of - each present their own unique challenges to the labour movement. It’s critical that we meet those challenges head-on, and I think my colleagues and I have a key role to play in that.

The company I work for is very influential in my industry. For the past decade, companies have looked to us for inspiration about how to organise the wage labour of their workers. I want the decade ahead to be about those same workers in those same companies looking to us for inspiration about a different kind of organising. I want the “Spotify Model” of the 2020s to be union membership.

This is a full archive copy of the inaugural post I wrote for the #kollektivavtal Slack channel at Spotify. On November 14, 2022 I created this channel and then copypasted in this pre-written text to try to start it off on the right foot.

It's time to move towards getting a collective agreement in place, like the majority of other workers in Sweden already have. Slido questions and ad-hoc Google doc petitions have served us well over the years, but the company's outgrown them: there are so many of us that it's become chaotic. We've become a large company, and now's the time to stop muddling along with a small company approach to these conversations. Going forward, the structure and leverage of a collective agreement is the way for us to influence how our working conditions evolve during the uncertain times ahead.

I personally have a lot of confidence in the current senior leadership team and I think they're genuinely committed to the Swedish values of Spotify's employer branding. That's the reason I feel comfortable posting this despite the stigma that exists around this topic in other countries: I don't anticipate any San Francisco-style unpleasantness. That's partly because collective agreements are as Swedish as julmust and parental equality and therefore an opportunity to develop the Spotify employer brand to a new level, but also because I think it's clear it's the right way to scale these conversations after this year of dizzying headcount growth.

In the short term, a collective agreement can also provide protection for benefits such as paid parental leave, which are otherwise theoretically vulnerable to being cut in favor of investments elsewhere. In the long term, it can even provide some continuity between senior leadership teams, by limiting how drastically a new CEO - for example - can change our working conditions.

I want to be clear that I don't believe any such changes are imminent, and that if they were, we'd be starting this process too late now anyway. But none of us has a crystal ball with which to make guarantees about what will or won't happen in the future, and especially not given the current macroeconomic context. In fact I believe this is another reason why a collective agreement could be welcomed by both sides: our current senior leadership team are sincere about the values underpinning the working conditions here at Spotify, and a collective agreement takes certain options off the table that investors may otherwise pressure them to consider if - for example - we have a bad series of quarterly results.

If you're on board with the idea. Join Unionen now if you're not already a member. There are other unions out there too, and membership in those also helps, but Unionen is the biggest, most inclusive choice, and a safe bet. If you're in Sweden on a work permit, look into guest membership. If you have any questions or thoughts, let's discuss them here in this channel. I know many of you have wanted a collective agreement for some time but are perhaps a little nervous about it, and I hope I've convinced you it's not as adversarial or conspiratorial as you might have thought. but if not. I'm also available to talk in private. I'm gonna get Unionen on the phone ASAP to discuss next steps, and if there's anything to share l'll post it here, so be sure to join the channel if you're interested!