In 2020 I finished my doctoral thesis The struggle over the value of public sector labour: Memories of the 2003 Municipal Workers' strike. With the intention of exploring conditions for public sector labour struggles, the study aims to empirically examine the extensive 2003 wage strike carried out by the Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union [Kommunal]. It also seeks to theoretically discuss the Kommunal strike as a struggle over the value of public sector labour and as an arena for collective mobilisation and subject formation. The method used is oral history, informed by feminist standpoint theory. Thirteen interviews were conducted with Kommunal activists and officials involved in the strike, predominantly at the local level. The interviews were complemented by contextualising texts, mainly from trade union press. The analysis has been carried out using Marxist and feminist perspectives on labour, class and gender relations and social change. 

The study finds that the meaning of the strike widely transcended the demands for higher wages. Striking enabled changes in subjectivity and generated new horizons of possibilities – a process analysed using the concept of cultures of solidarity. Such cultures were shaped by the intertwined aspiration for recognition and redistribution, rooted in the particular character and preconditions of public sector labour. Because the interviewees perceive their value as workers as linked to their value as human beings, and because this sense of value is in turn tied to their claim for the valorisation of the welfare state and of public service users, recognition and redistribution emerge in a co-constitutive relationship. 

The thesis is in Swedish. It can can be downloaded from Lund university Research Portal or bought from the publisher Leopard förlag.