Swedish Trade Union Confederation

The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Swedish:Landsorganisationen i Sverige, literally "National Organisation in Sweden"), commonly referred to as LO, 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, 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 2012 union density of Swedish blue-collar workers was 67%, a decline by ten percentage points in six since years (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.