This dissertation explores current topics of the Swedish industrial relations system and how labor market institutions affects the behavior and outcomes of firms and workers, using qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the role of bargaining power in modern labor markets.

As the dissertation is composed of four independent papers, it begins with a customary ”kappa”, which conceptually binds together and summarizes the four papers. The kappa provides the reader with a primer to the Swedish industrial relations system, presents the exit-voice framework as a fruitful model to study sources of bargaining power, discusses how technologies are shaped by bargaining power, and concludes with a discussion of how the Swedish IR system is particularly suited to address current labor market challenges within the so-called Rehn-Meidner framework. The kappa is concluded by summary of each paper.

Paper 1 explores the strategies and interactions of gig platforms with Swedish and Danish labor market institutions, including unions, government agencies, and legislators. We discuss platform rationales and strategies that lead to evasion or integration in the industrial relations system via the collective bargaining model. Chapter 2 is a case study on how technologies can be shaped to produce positive-sum outcomes in the rapidly advancing Swedish mining industry. The study considers how power resources within the industrial relations system’s web of rules inform and enforces constructive dialogue between unions and employers in technological bargaining. Paper 3 explores wages and the competitiveness of labor markets, considering impacts to the wage bargain from individual bargaining power, derived through labor demand in local labor markets, or by collective bargaining power through Sweden’s centralized model of wage formation. We find comparatively modest negative effects from employer concentration in Sweden, but that blue collar wages are positively impacted by increased employer concentration. The paper validates popular wage-concentration models, showing an ability to separate individual and collective bargaining power effects on wages. Paper 4 compares how lower and higher skill healthcare and welfare workers are impacted by privatization, by analyzing wage and income effects from reductions in employer concentration, and by treating privatization as a domestic outsourcing event. The results find a significant negative impact to incomes for (blue collar) care workers, but no significant effects to (white collar) nurses.