(AI-translation from the Swedish original.) On February 11, a seminar was held at LO-borgen in Stockholm under the heading "Reaching Out: Labor History for the 21st Century." The seminar was organized against the backdrop of the current cutbacks within the Labor Movement's archive and library, ARAB, which threaten the continued existence of the library section.
The organizers were ARAB together with ABF and Arbetarnas Kulturhistoriska Sällskap. Invited researchers and representatives of the trade union and political branches of the labor movement spoke about opportunities and strategies to spread knowledge about the history of the labor movement.
That the labor movement is struggling against the wind has hardly escaped anyone, with declining membership in the unions and with a Sweden Democrats offensive that even claims the folkhem idea and its history. As Barbro Budin, former program manager at IUL, emphasized, the problem is not national but international. She took France as an example, where Marine Le Pen has successfully claimed the labor movement's vocabulary and discourse, but the same thing has happened in a number of countries – all while the trade union movements fight internally and the labor parties are in decline.
Economic historian Maths Isacson argued that the difficulties in spreading labor history today largely concern what is told, and how. Early labor history was about struggle and development, while the last decades have rather been about management, and the latter is not easy to tell in an engaging way. We must secure the archives and museums, Isacson said, but we must also find and dare to tell stories – storytelling – that touch and do not shy away from what has been difficult and gone wrong. Anders Ferbe, chairman of the Ironworkers’ Workshop Club and former chairman of IF Metall, was on a similar line of thought: "It was easier to talk about Ådalen 1931 than about Bjuv 2020" [which was hit hard in connection with the closure of Findus a couple of years ago]. The dividing lines and conflicts remain but are no longer as clear, and reality involves both consensus and conflict.
The class society remains, he said, but it does not look as it used to and storytelling must take its starting point from today’s situation. The Social Democratic politician Jesper Eneroth went even further and said that Social Democracy and the labor movement fear history. When the Social Democrats designated themselves as the "party of the future," it was to avoid being associated with something past – but at the same time, other circles in society took the opportunity to look to history and make it their own.
Kjersti Bosdotter, chairman of Arbetarnas Kulturhistoriska Sällskap, began the whole day by saying how important it is to have the whole in historical processes, to give voice to all actors involved and to depict conflicts comprehensively. From a business history perspective, one can only agree: we need historiography that is nuanced, versatile and fact-based, not polarized. In the seminar at LO there was no time in the program for discussion, but it stirred many thoughts about whether the conditions for such multifaceted historiography are actually changing. If so, it is serious. "It is not only the winners who write history," to quote Jesper Eneroth, "it is those who write history who write history." This applies to the labor movement, but it applies equally to business as a whole.
