Swedish Trade Union Confederation

The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Swedish: Landsorganisationen i Sverige [ˈlânː(d)sɔrɡanɪsaˌɧuːnɛn iː ˈsvæ̌rjɛ] ^ⓘ; literally "The National Organisation in Sweden"), commonly referred to as LO (Swedish: [ˈɛ̂lːuː] ^ⓘ), is a national trade union centre, an umbrella organisation for fourteen Swedish trade unions that organise mainly "blue-collar" workers. The Confederation, which gathers in total about 1.5 million employees out of Sweden's 10 million people population, was founded in 1898 by blue-collar unions on the initiative of the 1897 Scandinavian Labour Congress and the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which almost exclusively was made up by trade unions. In 2019 union density of Swedish blue-collar workers was 60%, a decline by seventeen percentage points since 2006 (blue-collar union density in 2006: 77%). A strongly contributing factor was the considerably raised fees to union unemployment funds in January 2007 made by the new centre-right government.