We are a group of mine working women who started an independent women’s organisation called Gruvkvinnor [Mine women] in the northern part of Sweden a few years ago. Most of us work, or have been working in Kiruna for a state owned company called LKAB. They operate the biggest underground iron ore mine in the world and the company supplies the whole of Europe with minerals.

Kiruna is located in a region with a big mining industry called Malmfälten. LKAB is the largest iron ore company in the region and operates three mines within an area of 120 kilometers. The Kiruna mine employs 1500 workers and about 20 percent of them are women. There are also a large number of subcontractors who carry out work on behalf of LKAB. Women also work in these companies, but they are much fewer in number.

The group was founded in October 2018 but the work did not start then. Blue collar-working women had experienced unequal working conditions and sexual harassment for a long time. For example, our working clothes and shoes were not available in small sizes. The toilets were not equipped with running water so it was hard to change menstrual protection in a hygienic way. Pregnant women and parents were also discriminated against. The work tasks were adapted to men and it was a struggle every day to be respected by the male workers and management.

We felt that there was no one representing us on these issues - neither from the trade union nor from the company. We had no trust for the trade union organisation, as it also consisted mainly of men and had not previously shown any interest in these types of issues.

After many discussions with a lot of women at different workplaces we decided that something needed to be done. We were convinced that these issues were best addressed by women who experience the problems themselves, but we also believed in an organisation consisting only of blue collar working women. We wanted to ensure that no manager could attend the meetings and hear the women stories, creating a culture of insecurity and silence. We wanted to create a safe place where they would be able to raise their voice. We wanted free discussions and mutual understanding. We welcomed all women in production, regardless of company, so even if you worked for the parent company LKAB, cleaned the premises or were a mechanic for a subcontractor, you were welcome. This is not something the traditional trade unions do in Sweden, as their organising is restricted to different collective agreements that divide the employees at the workplaces.

Gruvkvinnor’s goal was to unite all these women to improve working conditions for all, and especially in matters related to the female body. But we did not consider ourselves opponents to the male part of the workforce, and believed the issues we pushed would also benefit them. For example, all the changing rooms at LKAB were renovated. Later we won a contractual change where men were given the opportunity to accompany their partners to the midwife during paid working hours.

Swedish Trade Unionism

It is important to understand how the Swedish trade union movement functions to understand why we decided to be independent from them. The Swedish trade union is very bureaucratised and strictly governed by by-laws and regulations.The trade unions in Sweden are an integral part of the Swedish labour market. The membership rate is around 70 percent, which is a high figure compared to the rest of the world. Most companies have signed a collective agreement where the unions have negotiated specific conditions for workers in the same industry regardless of the factory they work in. These agreements regulate, for example, working hours, wages and vacations. In any large industrial company, there are always several formally elected people working full-time on trade union issues only. But elections are tightly controlled from above and these people become very close to the company management. Many sit on the company boards.

One of the problems with this is that the unions are not very present in workplaces as they spend more time at the negotiating table with managers than with the union members. Many collective workers have lost trust in these formal representatives.

So why did we not want to be a part of the trade union apparatus with such a high membership? If we had become a part of the trade union apparatus, our hard work would have gone to waste immediately. Because of the strict bureaucracy we would not have been able to organise other women besides miners, and we would not have been able to organise women only. All of this is strictly regulated and we did not want to be limited in our work. Our main focus was the blue-collar women and their rights. To be a part of the trade union apparatus would not change any of their working conditions for the better.

First Initiatives and Building the Organisation

Our first meeting invitation was sent out as a text message that was passed on between different women. The first meeting was located in a basement room that we had borrowed. The goal for the meeting was to gather as many working women as possible. We wanted to meet women from different parts of the mining industry to see if there were others who felt discriminated against and overlooked. Women of different ages, from different companies and from different parts of production attended the meeting. We already felt there was a great need for us to pursue these issues and many were interested and committed to work further.

From that week on, a small but tight group worked very closely. We met several times a week to get the work going. Our hard work led to a #metoo leaflet with testimonies from female miners in Malmfälten. The leaflet was spread throughout LKAB’s mining area and we involved many to distribute them. The work site encompasses several thousand employees, both in the parent company and subcontractors. The aim was to reach out to male workers and show them a few examples of the sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination that women in the mine industry experienced. To distribute over a thousand leaflets in an industrial area, 3 kilometers in diameter, with operations both above and below ground, is quite difficult. This was only possible because we had a large number of people helping us with everything from layout, printing, premises and distribution. This was a collective effort in which both women and men from the mining community helped to reach as many people as possible.

That was the start of an organisation that became much bigger than we had hoped for. We had found a gap that needed to be filled.

We continued our work and created working groups that focused on various women-related issues. These working groups were put together by people who felt dedicated to a certain question. The #metoo-leaflet is an example of one of our first working groups. Gruvkvinnor had decided at a meeting, where all blue collar working women from the mining industry were invited, that a leaflet should be put together. The women who felt motivated and engaged to do it became a working group with the goal of creating and distributing the leaflet. The people inside the group worked closely together with meetings almost every week. The work included collecting testimonies from female workers, writing them down on paper, putting it all together, laying out the leaflet, printing it and finding people to distribute them. Afterwards the group summarised the work at a feedback meeting to evaluate the action and decide how to continue.

Except for the #metoo-testimonies, the most prioritised issues were the matters of parental leave, pregnancy and breastfeeding. Working groups were also created around these subjects. In this way of working we attracted women who were interested in working on one, or a few specific questions, but maybe not participate in every single one. We had several working groups running parallel to each other. In this way we got more efficient and it was easier to make people participate when they got to choose what kind of issue to get involved in.

We created a private Facebook-group so we could gather all the working women on one specific platform. We made our invitation through the Facebook-page and a lot of important information was shared through that channel. It became a communication forum where everyone could speak, and later on it also became an archive with our protocols and statutes.

We studied health and safety legislation so we would have more knowledge and facts than our counterparts. We took the initiative to invite the formal trade union representatives from all over the region to discuss these problems with the aim of setting a common goal for gender equality work. This was a way of pressuring the unions, and in turn the companies, to work for the demands we made. No one had more knowledge than we did, nor did anyone have better arguments, which meant that we walked out victorious from these types of meetings.

We also introduced our own Women’s Representatives, who were to be independently elected by the work mates, to safeguard the workplaces and serve as a link between the group and the collective. These representatives were only elected by women, and all the issues that were put in the hands of these representatives were handled by women only. This was not appreciated by the company and union. The company claimed that we did not have this right, and the union felt that we were trespassing into their territory. This was not something that could have existed within the framework of the trade union, as it does not allow separate organisation.

Independent organisation gave us a freedom that we would not have had anywhere else. We have achieved a lot of important changes in the mining industry during these years. For example, we forced LKAB to repay women who had been discriminated against during their pregnancies a total amount of over 100,000 euro. We became the ones who represented the majority of our members in the workplace, we started a podcast and we negotiated on specific issues with LKAB. We also saw a change in the attitude towards women. A lot of discrimination in workplaces ended.

Much of the work we did was located in the womens’ changing room, a place where both workers for the subcontractors and LKAB change clothes every day. We centered a lot of our work and communication in that area because barely any managers changed in our dressing rooms, and it was a place where almost all blue collar women passed through every day. So this was a strategically useful place to spread information and have confidential conversations. The second thing is that we prevented ourselves from being a service unit, meaning that almost every woman working on the site was close to our every day work. They heard conversations about issues we were pushing for, which made it much easier to get involved. We put up posters inside the changing rooms and we distributed a lot of information from there. It was a safe space for us and we reached the majority of workers from just one premise.

Above we mention all of our achievements, but we have not won all battles and every demand we pushed for has required a large amount of work. One disadvantage of being independent from the union apparatus was that we had no financial means other than the money that came from our own pockets. The companies and the trade unions have a lot more power when it comes to money. This was not all negative though, as the women who chose to get involved in the group felt a great responsibility for the issues and the work we did. As we had no financial contributors to consider, we were completely free to shape our own policy. The workers never had to doubt whom we represented and where we had our loyalty.

But the financial advantage of our opponents - which in this case were LKAB, the subcontractors and also the trade unions - became a quite significant problem. All of them put in a lot of money to block our progress in various ways. For example, LKAB chose to pay a union representative whose sole task was to work on gender equality issues. There were no elections for this position, the person was appointed entirely by the company and the union, which shows that they were probably very concerned about our progress. This was a way for them to maneuver us out of their playing field. As soon as they had weakened us enough, this full-time appointment was done away with.

Gruvkvinnor was growing and we knew our big support had made us powerful. We had a lot of women representatives and we pushed through with more demands. It was an intense period when our work started to pay off and we grew bigger pretty quickly. Our spokesperson got to participate in Sweden’s largest radio show with an audience of millions of listeners and we had ongoing negotiations with LKAB. The latter took a lot of energy from us. Negotiations are slow moving and easily gets you distracted from strategic considerations. It wasted energy and was not so successful.

Reflections

After these months, the small but somewhat more experienced core of the group started to weaken. We did not have the energy to organise and educate new members, so no one could relieve or replace us either. This is something we should have done differently. We should have focused more on the group, keeping up the good spirit and energy among the newcomers. It is hard to know what is best to do when no one has done it before you. Someone has to be first. And when it comes to gender equality work at LKAB and in the mining industry in Malmfälten, we can proudly say that we took the lead. We broke new ground for the position of women in a male-dominated world. But we could also have done it better.

Gruvkvinnor still exists, but we have worked really hard to keep up the activity ever since the pandemic. Almost all of our key players were exhausted at that time and it was hard to keep up the motivation during isolation. In the beginning we tried online meetings. We even tried meeting outside, in -15 degrees celsius sitting around a campfire. But when the pandemic seemed neverending it got really hard. The whole society was on hold. Our work too.

Now we are trying to restart the group, because we know it is necessary for us to be out at workplaces.

We have evaluated our work and know that we made considerable change. We have educated women through struggles and it has been incredible to see a whole collective fighting for their rights. We have seen the sparks in women’s eyes after successful battles and the camaraderies among us has created a safe place for so many. The community we created and the trust we got from so many workers were a big part of our achievements. We were not seasoned activists in the beginning but made it together. We have both victories and setbacks behind us, but the most important thing was that we supported each other along the way. We succeed because of our independent organisation.