1976 LO Wage-Earner Funds Proposal (Meidner Plan)
LO economist Rudolf Meidner's working group proposed in 1975 that a fixed share of corporate profits be transferred as new share issues into union-administered collective funds, gradually shifting ownership of large companies to collective employee control. The LO congress formally voted in favour in 1976, triggering the most radical economic-democracy debate in post-war Western Europe and a decade-long counter-mobilisation by Swedish business.
Rudolf Meidner’s LO working group published the wage-earner funds report in 1975 and brought it to the LO congress for endorsement in 1976. The proposal asked that a fixed share of large companies’ annual profits — typically estimated at 20 per cent — be issued as new shares directly into collective funds administered by the trade-union movement. Compounded over decades, the mechanism would have gradually transferred majority ownership of medium and large Swedish firms to collective employee control without expropriation, taxation, or any single legislative break.
The Meidner plan was the most radical economic-democracy proposal advanced by any major Western European labour movement in the post-war era. It crystallised a decade-long ideological battle: Swedish business — SAF, the new Timbro think tank, Näringslivets Fond — mobilised as an organised counter-movement at a scale unprecedented in Swedish politics, culminating in the 4 October 1983 protest outside the Riksdag.
The plan also decoupled LO from the Social Democratic Party tempo: the trade-union confederation pushed faster than the SAP leadership was prepared to legislate, generating internal tensions that shaped Olof Palme‘s second cabinet from 1982 onwards. By the time the five regional funds were actually legislated in 1983, the design had been diluted to a fraction of Meidner’s original ambition — and a 1991 Bildt government would abolish them altogether.