Sociala dialogens jämställdhetspolitiska dilemma - En intervjustudie om de svenska centralorganisationernas förhållningssätt till ett av Europeisk Unionens främsta socialpolitiska problem

Abstract

The European Union has continuously emphasized the importance of social politics, and the harmonization of gender equality policies amongst its member states. Since most of the union’s social- and gender equality policies have been advanced to primary law, its significance has become even further underlined. The European Social Dialogue operates as one of the union’s social policy tools, partly because of its duty to oversee the implementation of the policies, but also because it operates as a co-legislator on social policy. Earlier research has mainly been focusing on the occurring problems of the implementation process of social- and gender equality policy, since the implementation has often turned out to be inadequate. Therefore, it is my aim to examine the Swedish trade union confederations’ views on the Social Dialogue’s complex of problems, due to their shared responsibility of the implementation of gender equality policies in Sweden, but also to compare the confederations views with earlier research. The results from this study indicates that the trade union confederations’ views coincide with the earlier research, which further indicate that the confederations conclusions may be eminent to the explanation of the gender equality policies’ deficiency.