During the 2000s, in Sweden, as in other European countries, the transport sector that once was public owned has been subjected to neoliberal privatisation. The involvement of private actors in public transport entails changes in industrial relations, which have impact in the workplace. In this paper, though a power recourse lens, we discuss a multifaceted labour dispute that occurred 2018 to 2021 between Arriva (now VR Sverige), the private company that runs the regional train service in the Swedish southern region of Skåne, and the local trade union club Klubb Pågatåg, affiliated with the blue-collar trade union federation Seko (Service- och Kommunikationsfacket). Started in conjunction with the negotiations for renewing the local collective agreement initially set for April 2020, the dispute became sharper following the decision of the company to implement a business plan contemplating the redefinition of individual terms of employment for all employees and, later, the attempt to fire the local trade union health and safety representative appointed by Klubb Pågatåg who confronted that decision. By relying on interviews, observations, online material as well as legal documents analysis, we discuss the significance of the 2020–2021 Pågatåg and the capacity of a local trade union to successfully engage in a dispute by mobilising associational power resources even against institutional constraints. In line with global trends, our paper shows the strength of logistics workers (broadly conceived) in attempting to change power relations on the labour market through local union organising.

Consumption spaces are culturally allegedly equally accessible to all, based on a person’s abilityto spend money. Critical race studies in a North American context have shown, however, thatconsumption spaces are highly racialized. Racism in consumption spaces in northern Europe isan under-researched area. This article is based on interviews with individuals racialized as non-White about experiences of everyday racism in consumption places in Sweden. It aims to fillthis research gap and answer the questions of how people respond to experiences of racism inconsumption spaces, and how we can understand the spatial aspects of racism that are actedout and reproduced in spaces of consumption. As consumption is a central part of urban life,this understanding helps to further reveal the depth of social inequalities that in turn reinforcepatterns of urban segregation and social spatial division. Theoretically, the spatialization ofeveryday racism and the notion of color-blindness that is prevalent in Sweden underlines howthese experiences shape urban practices such as spatial exclusion and self-constraint.

This article analyses written online responses to Swedish retail stores’ social media advertisements broadly addressing the Muslim celebration of Ramadan. It is based on a selection of 19 social media advertisement posts that together generated a total of 2988 responses in discussion threads. The customer responsive comments are analysed through the theoretical lens of race and racism in the digital society and theories of everyday nationhood and nationalism. At large, the result shows that the social media platforms can be seen as facilitators of anti-Muslim racism. However, the advertisements and the responses to them, which express dislike of as well as support for the retailers, Muslim traditions and the Muslim community, illustrate a negotiation of nationhood which is characterized on the one side by racist anger and fear of loss of nation, and on the other side by support for inclusion. Inspired by the concept of ‘predatory inclusion’, the article argues that this paradoxical phenomenon illustrates both inclusion and exclusion. The retail stores’ social media platforms are not only spaces of hatred against Muslims but also a space in which resistance to anti-Muslim racism is articulated and where constructions of Swedishness are challenged. 

This email conversation revolves around ten decolonial propositions on Sweden. It offers reflections on the roles of race in Swedish society. Including, its denials or forgetting, its intersections with gender, sexuality, religion, culture, nationhood, migration, class and other social categories, the roles of blackness and whiteness to anti-racist struggles, the realities of residential racial segregation, the existence of racism in healthcare, the internal colonialism of Roma in Europe, the ties of race and whiteness to colonial history, and more.

Over the last several years, several reforms have been implemented in Sweden, specifically targeting women and children in what the state has named as “vulnerable areas”. The reforms have been presented as feminist measures that will secure the integration of “foreign-born women” and reduce everything from criminality to poverty. This article explores the public debate on the relationship between families and crime, the reform of the supplement to family with more than one child and family planning. The article discusses how racialized mothers and their children are defined as a threat to the nation, its welfare and its national security. Inspired by feminist research on the relationship between social reproduction and the carceral state, I argue that analysis of the current political conjuncture in Sweden needs to take into consideration how policing in the streets and at the nation’s borders is entangled with policing in the sphere of social reproduction

Through the concepts of temporal racism and racial capitalism, this articleexplores how time is racialized in Swedish unemployment projects, shapinga racialized and gendered division of labor. The article identifies three formsof temporal racism practices: temporal racism through the invisibilization ofwork, through waiting, and through wasting. I argue that these practices oftemporal racism create diverse forms of labor and are therefore importantfactors in the production and reproduction of racial capitalism. Temporalracism deprives those defined as ‘foreign-born unemployed women’ of timefor joy, pleasure, community, and family; instead, it ensures that their time isused to transform them into racialized workers, moving between precariousemployment and surplus populations.

This chapter examines the role of white- and male-dominated unions in shaping the racial capitalism of the so-called Swedish Model. Inspired by Du Bois’ re-writing of US history, where white (and male) trade unions play a central role in producing and reproducing racial labor and social inequalities, the chapter follows the thread outlined by Du Bois argument, on the centrality of labor unions in understanding the preproduction of racial capitalism. It contributes to the growing literature on racial capitalism in domestic labor and welfare relations—while pointing to both a continuity of an ethno-racial Swedish welfare nation-state as well as the recent neoliberal rupture in it. The chapter departs from the transition from a Keynesian labor market in which racial capitalism was relatively hidden by a project of subordinated inclusion toward a neoliberal labor market characterized by exclusionary subordination with a racialized stratification of employees. The chapter ends with a discussion of how trade unions—which are central to the Swedish Model—may challenge racial capitalism.

In Sweden, during the parliamentary election campaign in 2022, birth control and family planning were identified as practices that could solve all variety of social problems, from poverty to crime. They were also presented as a solution to migrant women’s supposed lack of integration into Swedish society.

Criticism towards discourses and policies of family planning is extensive, from scholars challenging the notion of ‘voluntariness’ to those arguing that, in family planning, women’s lives are subordinated to economic and developmental goals. While contraceptive technologies hold an impressive emancipatory power in the lives of women globally, vulnerable groups of women have, in the name of family planning, experienced forced sterilisation and reproductive coercion.

This chapter aims to analyse political discourses and governmental policies on reproduction through the conceptual lens of reproductive racism. We hope to challenge what we identify as historical amnesia concerning Swedish ‘family planning’ and show how, in different ways, reproductive rights in Sweden are inscribed and embedded into racial inequalities.

The empirical material presented here has been collected with the aim of illustrating governmental policies that historically and today shape and frame diverse forms of reproductive racism with a special focus on welfare professionals.