"This collection of statistics on the membership development of Swedish national unions and union confederations since the end of the nineteenth century is based on several decades of work to collect the data. My PhD dissertation Facklig organisering i tolv länder (Lund: Arkiv förlag 1983) is first and foremost about the development of union density from a historical and internationalt perspective, but contains also membership statistics. A vast amount of membership statistics was produced when I participated in the international comparative project ”The Development of Trade Union Systems in Western European Societies” (DUES) with researchers from 15 European countries under supervision of Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser. After many years since the start of this project, the book Trade Unions in Western Europe since 1945 (Macmillan Press: Series "The Societies of Europe", 2000; 807 pages) was published. My chapter “Sweden” is found on pages 605-655.
Since then I have followed up the membership development by data obtained from trade unions and union confederations on the number of active members, i.e. excluding pensioners and students."

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