This manuscript put into a historical context the continuities and discontinuities of the employment conceptions and policies of leading social democrats in Sweden and Finland 1975–1998. It concentrates on the decision-making of the most influential political parties in the two Nordic countries at that time, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Social Democratic Party in Finland (SDP), including social democrats inside the central organisations of blue collar trade unions (SAK in Finland and LO in Sweden). Researching the roots of relationship between Nordic Social Democracy, employment and globalisation has become a topical theme after the Great Recession of the twenty-first century and the following uncertainty in the global labour markets have been intertwined with the rising of nationalist, extremist and populist sentiments in the 2010s. The dawning deglobalization has been affected by a record-level global unemployment rate, which is predicted to rise despite the fact that only a quarter of global workforce is employed on a permanent, not always full-time contract . The transformation of Keynesian post-Second World War Western welfare states and their full employment policies turned into unemployment-hit Schumpeterian post-national workfare regimes from the mid-1970s onwards . Unemployment also increased in the wage work-oriented Nordic societies , which represented to some scholars a generous social democratic welfare state model . The Nordic welfare states were not solely social democratic constructions , but influential social democrats urged the maintenance or achievement of full employment . Thus, analysing employment-sensitive concepts and policies of Nordic social democrats reveals integral pain spots, which the famous Nordic model has confronted in an era of globalizing capitalism.

2020