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As a trade union we work locally trying to improve women’s conditions of employment by focusing on reducing part time work and temporary employment, stressing the importance of fulltime work and permanent employment to reduce gender inequality. Most of this is work is connected to working with active measures on gender equality at workplaces.

Handels stresses that gender inequality in working life and gender inequality in family life is intertwined. For women to be able to fully be a part of the labour market there has to be a better balance when it comes to responsibilities in family life.



In the central office we mainly focus on supporting and developing the local work. Above this Handels has made it a profile issue to stress the importance of coordinated wage negotiations within the labour trade unions (LO). In this we have had success, resulting in stronger coordination for raising women wages. This by focusing on raising minimumwages and by making sure that female dominated sectors gets more money in actual raises (in difference to procentual raises, which has a tendency to maintain status qou) In this way the aim is to redistribute money between maledominated and femaledominated sectors as well as between men and women in same sectors. The attached file, "Utvärdering jämställdhetsprofil", gives a deeper evaluation of the result of this work when it comes to wages for men and women in swedish retail. In short the result in retail is that women now earn 95% of mens wages, in 2006 women earned 93,4% of mens wages.



Handels has made it a profile issue to stress the importance of coordinated wage negotiations within the labour trade unions (LO). In this we have had success, resulting in stronger coordination on raising women wages. This by focusing on raising minimum wages and by making sure that female dominated sectors gets more money in actual raises (in difference to relative raises). The aim is to redistribute money between male dominated and female dominated sectors as well as between men and women in same sectors. In short the result in retail is that women now earn 95% of men’s wages, in 2006 women earned 93,4% of men’s wages.



Another important focus for Handels is to form political opinion regarding gender equality.

In our political work we focus on delivering statistics and reports in the public opinion and more specifically to the political parties, especially to the labour party with which we have a regular interaction. This way we try to establish the conditions of our members as a picture for politicians of what is important policy issues regarding gender equality to work on. As well as we take part of policy work groups between LO and the labour party regarding labour market-, welfare- and gender equality policies. Being the biggest trade union in the female dominated private service sector makes our points of view hard to neglect, even though we do not always get what we wish for – especially not this last period with a rightwing government.



Over all, Handels view is that the Swedish welfare system, built on a big public sector, providing a range of welfare services when it comes to care for elderly, children, disabled etc, is of great importance for gender equality. The obvious reason is of course that without welfare services women has less access to the economic independence full participation in labour market guarantees. Another important reason is that with a big public sector, supplying close to half of the female working force with employment with relatively good conditions, there is less risk that the private service sector falls too much below the working conditions and wages in the public service sector. So strategically for Handels the working conditions in the public service sector is of great importance.



Handels om jämställdhet ( PPT): This material describe Handels fundamental views on gender equality and some examples on how the swedish labourmarket and Handels own areas are structured by gender regarding wages, workinghours and conditions of employment.

Handels stresses that gender inequality in working life and gender inequality in family life is intertwined. For women to be able to fully be a part of the labour market there has to be a better balance when it comes to responsibilities in family life.

The material therefore show graphs on how parental leave and how much time spent performing tasks in family life is distributed between men and women. Further, the material summarize how Handels work in different levels with gender equality.





The document in english “Gender equality in working and family life” is the presentation of a report we published a few years ago, examining why women have lower wages and work more parttime. The presentation gives a deeper understanding on our view of gender equality.



The last document “Handels jämställdhetsplan 2010” is a policy for our own internal work with gender equality and policy against harrasment and sexual harrasment. This contains our own mapping and analysis of working conditions for men and women employed by Handels and describes what kind of active measures we take as employers in the organisation. It is a good example of how to write a document on working with gender equality in a workplace to fulfill the demands on active measures in the swedish antdiscrimination act.