Rudolf Meidner
German-born Swedish economist; co-architect, with Gösta Rehn, of the Rehn–Meidner model that underwrote the Folkhemmet welfare state from the 1950s, and lead author of the 1975 LO report that became the basis of the löntagarfonder (wage-earner funds) proposal — the most divisive plank of Swedish economic-democracy politics in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Rudolf Meidner fled Nazi Germany for Sweden as a 19-year-old Jewish refugee in 1933 and became, over the following half-century, the most influential economist inside the Swedish trade-union federation LO. With Gösta Rehn he developed the Rehn–Meidner model presented to the 1951 LO congress: solidaristic wage policy that deliberately compressed differentials and pushed uncompetitive firms out, paired with active labour-market policy and restrictive macroeconomics. The model underwrote Swedish economic policy through the long Folkhemmet decades — its imprint runs through Erlander‘s third cabinet and well into the Palme years.
In 1973-1975 Meidner chaired the LO working group on capital formation and economic democracy. The resulting Löntagarfonder report — the Meidner Plan — proposed that profitable firms issue new shares each year into collective union-controlled funds, gradually transferring ownership of Swedish industry into wage-earner hands. It is the high-water mark of Swedish economic-democracy ambition. See 1976 LO Wage-Earner Funds Proposal (Meidner Plan).
The controversy was decisive. The plan helped lose SAP the 1976 election and broke the post-war consensus with Swedish business. A substantially watered-down löntagarfonder law passed under Palme in 1983 — Meidner himself viewed the compromise as a hollowing-out of his proposal — and the funds were dissolved by the Bildt government in 1991. Meidner continued to write on the model’s logic and its failure until his death in 2005.