Unions, collective agreements and a-kassa

This is the most common misunderstanding, and it costs people money. An a-kassa is an unemployment insurance fund: an association that pays out benefit if you lose your job, under rules set in law that are identical across every fund. A trade union is a membership organisation that negotiates pay and conditions, takes up cases against employers and supports its members.

They are two memberships with two fees. You can belong to an a-kassa without belonging to a union, and you can belong to a union without belonging to an a-kassa. Many unions run an a-kassa with a near-identical name and offer both in the same sign-up form, which is exactly why the two get confused.

It is membership of the a-kassa — not of the union — that sets how high the benefit is. Entitlement itself comes from the income condition, so even someone who has never been a member can get the lowest level of 50%; membership time decides whether it is 60 or 80 instead. And that time cannot be acquired after the fact.

There is no law setting the lowest wage an employer may pay. Instead, pay floors are set in collective agreements between unions and employer organisations, sector by sector. Those agreements cover around nine in ten employees in Sweden.

That means the floor differs between sectors, and that it is negotiated rather than legislated. It also means that someone working at a workplace without a collective agreement has no pay floor at all beyond what their own employment contract says.

The salary statistics on this site come from Statistics Sweden and describe what is actually paid — not what some agreement sets as a minimum. The two are related but not the same: an occupation’s median salary normally sits well above the agreed floor for its sector.

The spread in the statistics says something about how much the agreements and local negotiations leave open. Occupations where the lowest and highest tenths sit close together are usually tightly governed by agreements; occupations with a wide spread tend to have more individual pay-setting.

The statistics do not, however, distinguish between workplaces with and without a collective agreement, and they know nothing about which union anyone belongs to. Figures like that do not exist in the Swedish salary structure statistics, and this site does not pretend otherwise.

Swedish unions are grouped into three confederations, roughly by educational background rather than by sector: LO for blue-collar workers, TCO for white-collar employees and Saco for graduates. Around fifty individual unions sit beneath them.

Which union is the right one depends on what you do and who you do it for — not on your job title in the statistics. The same occupation can belong to different unions depending on whether the employer is municipal, central government or private, which is why this site does not name a union per occupation. That answer lives with the unions themselves.

Unemployment benefit is calculated on income up to a ceiling. If you earned more than that, the excess is not replaced at all, and for many people that is the larger part of the drop.

Many unions therefore offer an income insurance (inkomstförsäkring) included in the membership fee or available as an add-on. It tops up the a-kassa benefit, up to a higher income and for a limited number of months. Terms vary a great deal between unions, and this is where the difference between union membership and a-kassa membership alone shows up most clearly in money.

• Sveriges a-kassor The umbrella site for every Swedish unemployment insurance fund, with help finding the right one.
• IAF – the Swedish Unemployment Insurance Inspectorate The supervisory authority. The rules as they actually read.
• Arbetsförmedlingen The public employment service. You must be registered there to be entitled to benefit.
• LO The Swedish Trade Union Confederation — blue-collar unions.
• TCO The confederation for white-collar employees.
• Saco The confederation for professional and graduate associations.

Work out your unemployment benefit