During the 1980s, Sweden saw several rent protests and rent strikes in different parts of the country. While there is an obvious continuity from the Swedish rent contention in the 1970s, the rent contention in the 1980s is in itself an interesting topic to study. The influence of radical leftist groups in the 1980s isn’t as obvious as it appears to have been in the 1970s, and rent striking seems to have been seen as a legitimate way of handling grievances during the first half of the 1980s. Most of the rent protests took place in municipal and other forms of non-speculative housing, and contention took place both between tenant and landlord and within the established organisations of the tenant’s movement, thus turning into a challenge against the social democratic leadership. Using the theoretical framework of Contentious Politics Studies (CPS), this chapter examines rent contention in Sweden during the 1980s and especially the rent strikes of the period, looking at the role of rent striking and other forms of protests in the tenant contentious repertoire of that era. Of particular interest is the disappearance of evidence of rent strikes after 1985, signifying a change to the contentious tenant repertoire.
In 2019 we organized a conference casting light on the housing crisis and especially on the historical and contemporary organization of tenants to contest housing inequalities. By placing housing struggles and tenants’ organization at the centre of the debate we aimed at exposing and politicizing current capitalist development and, hopefully, at proposing a different view of how housing can be organized and imagined by discussing how resistance can be used, with what effects and how it can be connected to other struggles. This special issue is a result of this conference dealing with tenants’ organization in different contexts examining how tenants organize(d), why and what could be learned from it. In this introducing text we give an overview of this field of research by asking why tenants’ mobilizations are important to study, what is still under-studied in the field and which perspectives are important to raise in future research.
Shelton Stromquist has written a long and very rich account of the international history of local socialist activism, often called municipal socialism. Drawing on various examples, Stromquist wants to shift the focus from national parliamentary politics and centrist narratives to the local level, where the labour movement was built. At a time when local struggles such as affordable housing are once again on the agenda of progressive activists, this book offers important insights into the early local history of labour politics and inspiration for contemporary activists and municipal socialists.
The Swedish Union of Tenants is known today as perhaps the strongest tenants’ organisation in the world, with an established institutional role in the rent-setting system and a mandate to collectively bargain rents. What is relatively unknown, however, is that this system emerged out of a period of widespread rent struggle during the mid-war period. This was especially noteworthy in the city of Gothenburg. During the 19th Century, Gothenburg had become an important industrial centre and its population multiplied tenfold. Together with other groups, such as clerks and small shop owners, the workers formed a distinct popular class culture with organisational expressions and collective mobilisation that changed the social and political order of the city forever. One of these expressions was the tenants’ unions, seen as a sort of trade unions for the rented home. Tenants’ unions advocated protective legislation for tenants and confronted landlords, both with legal means and with militant methods such as rent strikes and blockades. This militancy reached its highest levels from 1932 to 1937. The collective mobilisation and organisation of the tenants altered the power relations between landlords and tenants, which can be seen both in the concessions made by landlords in numerous conflicts and in the fact that the landlords altered their organisations to defend themselves against the tenant offensive. By the time of the rent control act of 1942, centralised collective bargaining had been largely implemented and the collective organisations had become established and recognised interest organisations. The historical relationship between organised labour and tenants, and the effect of tenant organising on the rental market, are still under-researched subjects. This article is intended to both explore the historic rise of the tenants’ movement and to show the very real historical conflict between independent grassroot organisations and political parties in housing and labour history.
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