Labour's Memory. Digitization of annual and financial reports of blue-collar worker unions 1880-2020

The labour movement has played a crucial role in the development of Swedish democracy. Trade unions were especially important in building the welfare state and in shaping the structure of the labour market. The Swedish trade union federations and their confederation, Landsorganisationen, also play an important role internationally.

Their archives offer a unique potential to create comprehensive time series on the mobilization and organization of the largest organization in Sweden’s civil society. In order to accomplish this goal, the material needs to be digitized and made searchable.

This project will create a collection of digitised annual and financial reports from local, regional, national and international trade union organisations from 1880 to 2020. The digitised material will be indexed and made searchable in collaboration with labour history experts and computational linguists. The database will be developed, stored and made available for researchers by the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archive and Library, the Popular Movements’ Archive in Uppsala, the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie and the International Institute of social history.

These four archival institutions will make the data easily and permanently available to the research community. Combining holdings enables us to create a unique infrastructure that connects the local, regional, national and international levels.