From solidarity to control: Tracing the changing conceptualization of worker protection in Swedish labour market policy

Worker protection has been a defining feature of the Swedish welfare model, traditionally rooted in collective institutions, union power, and solidaristic interpretations of labor market governance. However, the meaning and practice of worker protection are neither static nor self-evident. Drawing on scholarship on conceptual politics and governance, this article argues that worker protection is a politically charged concept whose content and function evolve over time through discourse, policy debates, and institutional practice. Following a genealogical approach, the study traces how the conceptualization of worker protection in Sweden has shifted from its classic collectivist understanding in the late twentieth century to increasingly individualistic and risk-based constructions in the twentyfirst century. The article situates worker protection within the theoretical terrain of the culture of control, highlighting the growing emphasis on regulation, risk management, and moralized oversight in contemporary governance. This perspective suggests that political ideas and social concerns are shaped through language and symbolic practices; concepts act as tools for guiding institutional action. Against this backdrop, the study examines how Swedish worker protection has been reconfigured from collective solidarity toward a control-oriented logic, reflecting broader shifts in political rationalities, institutional priorities, and labor market norms, where risks to workers, businesses, and the welfare system are managed through selective intervention and moralized governance. Methodologically, the article adopts a genealogical approach focused on identifying shifts in key problem representations over time rather than mapping linear policy development. This “history of the present” approach seeks to reveal the contingencies, power struggles, and discursive discontinuities underpinning what appear, retrospectively, as settled truths about social and labor market policy. The empirical material consists of public documents, policy reports, and central concepts mobilized in Swedish labour market discourse since the 1990s, including social dumping, flexibility, and work-related crime, which have influenced how worker protection is framed and understood. The analysis unfolds in three parts. First, it examines the historical role of social dumping as a problem representation framing worker protection in collective and solidaristic terms. In this phase, protection was predominantly articulated as a defence of the Swedish labour market model, with unions and collective bargaining as primary vehicles for equitable wages and working conditions. At the same time, this defence often privileged the resilience of the model itself over substantive reforms, such as minimum wage legislation, creating tensions within the discourse. Second, the article documents the emergence of more individualistic interpretations of worker protection. This shift coincides with neoliberal and market-oriented influences, in which flexibility becomes a normative ideal and vulnerability is increasingly framed as an individual risk managed through legislation and personal competence rather than collective strength. Here, protection is reframed as personal adaptability and employability rather than collective rights. Third, it considers the rise of work-related crime as a moralised labour market concern, reflecting a broader cultural shift toward governing social order through crime prevention and risk management, further dispersing traditional solidaristic notions of worker protection. Together, these analyses reveal how Swedish worker protection has been reconceptualized along a continuum from collective institutionalism toward individual responsibility and risk governance. The study contributes to understanding how welfare state concepts are reconfigured over time and underscores the importance of discursive politics in shaping labor market policy and governance.