Trade Union Officials and the Political Representation of the Working Class in Switzerland (1880-2020)

The underrepresentation of the working class in parliaments has garnered increasing attention in political science research, especially against a backdrop of growing economic inequality. Existing literature on the descriptive representation of workers has primarily addressed this issue by investigating whether and why individuals from certain social classes are more likely to hold elected office than those from other backgrounds. In this paper, we adopt a different perspective by examining the direct involvement of trade unions and their leaders in elected office. We argue that trade unions, as democratic organizations that unite workers and seek to advance their interests, are critical actors to bring class issues into institutional politics, and must therefore be considered in analysing workers’ representation in democratic institutions. While various facets of their political work – particularly their relationship with left parties (e.g., Allern and Bale 2017) – have been relatively well studied, their direct participation in elected office remains underexplored. For the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on Inequality and the Politics of Class in the 21st Century, our paper thus aligns closely with paper request number 4: Political actors’ substantive, descriptive and symbolic representation of the working class. Drawing on a novel dataset that tracks the political and union careers of Swiss trade union officials from 1880 to 2020 (comprising over 1’100 individuals from all the major unions that are part of the Swiss Federation of Trade Unions), we analyse the proportion of union officials holding elected office and its evolution over time. We show a significant engagement of trade unionists in Swiss politics (at the local, cantonal or federal level), but also a marked decrease in office-holding during the last 40 years. Examining the educational and occupational background of trade union secretaries, we also demonstrate that, until the 1970s, most of them exercised a manual occupation before working for a trade union. This suggests that trade unions, in an era of salient class cleavage, played a critical role in fostering both the professional and political advancement of people from modest background. However, we also observe some class-based differentiation. Union secretaries with an academic background were more likely to attain elected office than those with a working-class background. Since the 1980s-90s, there has been a strong increase in the number of secretaries (often with an academic background) recruited from outside the organization, often without prior occupational experience in the economic sector represented by the union, reflecting a trend toward the professionalization of union officials. Our findings contribute to the literature on (working-)class descriptive representation and the broader research on the political role of trade unions.