- PURPOSE AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROJECT.
The context and basis for the research project were expressed in the application as follows: Research on trade unions has identified the double challenge that trade unions face—not only with employers and the state but also with their own members— regarding how to keep the trade union together. One particular challenge is how to build solidarity in a context in which the number of migrant workers is increasing and working-class support for anti¬immigrant extreme right-wing parties is growing.

A study of Swedish blue-collar trade unions is particularly interesting for three reasons: the historical strength of trade unions, the large percentage of members with foreign backgrounds, and the rapid increase in support among blue-collar workers for the Sweden Democrats.

The research question framing this proposal is how an important organization for Swedish industrial relations negotiates what seems to be a fundamental contradiction amongst its members. The aim is to analyze the strategies and actions taken by trade unions in relation to migrant workers, ethnic diversity, and members and activists displaying support for extreme right-wing parties.

The theoretical frame is drawn from labor studies and industrial relations research, complemented by feminist scholarship and migration and ethnic studies. The focus is on theorizing the concept of trade union solidarity. Methodologically, the project is an ethnographic study of five blue-collar trade unions and Landsorganisationen (LO), employing semi¬structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis.

- BRIEFLY ABOUT THE IMPLEMENTATION.
The material collected consisted of interviews with trade union representatives at the national, regional, and local levels and included trade union representatives from LO and most of its member unions. In addition, the analysis is based on documents produced by the trade unions and the trade union press. Finally, limited fieldwork has been carried out in relation to meetings, training, and also workplaces. Due to the late start, the pandemic, etc. the project has been extended in time. Furthermore, as reported in the mid-term evaluation, the material collection changed from focusing on LO and a few selected trade unions to focusing on LO and a broader selection of LO trade unions. Furthermore, several of the planned publications have been significantly delayed. This means that a short popular scientific text and an additional article and chapter will be published later. Finally, through a later Forte-funded project involving non-LO unions, at least one, perhaps two of the texts will include a trade union confederation class-based comparative perspective.

- THE PROJECT'S THREE MAIN RESULTS, AND A DISCUSSION OF THE PROJECT'S CONCLUSIONS.
Based on interviews and documents, the project has explored rhetoric and practice in relation to three arenas for intervention: social policy, party relations, and within the workers' collective. The socio-political work against racism can basically be understood as two different practices. On the one hand, work against neoliberalism, which forms the basis for the union's understanding of how racism can be explained. Here there is a nostalgic narrative that under the Keynesian welfare regime, with a policy of full employment and reduced social inequality, there was little or no basis for working-class racism. A special feature here is also the issue of the union being able to (participate in) control labor immigration, as both EU membership and labor immigration have been seen as a threat and thus a basis for racism. The second practice focuses on the "equal value of all human beings" and is aimed at combating the SD and their racism and emphasizing that attitudes that distinguish between humans and humans are wrong.

Work against racism in the workplace and through industrial relations between unions and employers has mainly focused on joint declarations against racism and xenophobia and the responsibility of employers to prevent discrimination and take responsibility for a working environment free from racist and xenophobic harassment by managers and employees. This arena of trade union struggle, which has historically been the central - core - activity, with collective agreements and negotiations at local and central levels, is the arena where the issue of racism and xenophobia is least present in the material. Finally, the workers' collective is the third arena of struggle against racism and xenophobia. This arena appears to be both the most complicated and the most important from a strategic perspective. Complicated because it involves tensions, conflicts, and possible antagonism between workers in the same workplace, in the same union. Most important for LO's basic strategy has been to have a high level of organization and to create the imagined solidarity that develops union strength through concrete activities and ideological work. In this arena, education dominates as a practice to counter racism: training of representatives, elected officials, and members, training with different pedagogies and orientations.

One conclusion is that the limited and over time uneven work against racism made visible in the analysis should be called work against racism (not anti-racism), which is mainly understood as an effect of capitalism and class conflict - a class reductionist analysis, and as ignorance among workers interpellated by the rhetoric and activities of the Sweden Democrats.

Inspired by the concept of imagined solidarity, the challenge of the trade union movement is to merge the different interests of the working class and union members through strategic creative imagination. The project has shown that this has become an increasingly prominent feature of trade union rhetoric mainly because it is perceived to threaten trade union solidarity and (social democratic) political mobilization. However, success in developing creative trade union strategies to achieve this has been limited and it is more likely that imagined solidarity is gradually declining. The explanations for this are many and require further research. The project has shown a willingness and practice, with few exceptions, to reduce the work against racism to a marginal problem. Not primarily because of a lack of interest, but first and foremost as a result of a lack of analysis and an absence of a creative strategy for imagined solidarity within the union. The starting point has mainly been how the union can combat support for SD and xenophobic jargon and views, rather than understanding its link to racism and the need for union anti-racism. At the heart of this is the idea that this can be done without changing the union organization and its basic practices, and without provoking the members who sustain the racist practice, thus risking manifest conflict and/or the departure of these members.

Although the LO and its unions have been weakened and have come to develop member service rather than a more class conflict-oriented practice, the basic analysis is based on a reformist understanding, to some extent influenced by Marxism, characterized by the idea of the Swedish model of labor relations where negotiations, especially collective agreements, are central. This has two consequences - racism is seen as an effect of capitalist (rising) inequalities, thus missing and avoiding developing a structural understanding of racism beyond class. Further, as has only been noted in this project, it is a methodologically nationalist analysis. The LO trade unions represent their members and in particular their white male members in Sweden and which, despite the idea of international solidarity and some international activity, ignores the global nature of capitalism and the link between the Swedish model and global racial capitalism.

The trade unions thus risk, through their practice with a nation-state focus and by seeing racism as an effect of the inequalities of national capitalism, not only contributing to the reproduction of the global racial formation of which Sweden is a part but also reducing racism to a combination of neoliberal policies with increasing gaps and the political project of the Sweden Democrats. Except when the super-exploitation of the global racial formation makes itself visible, not the least linked to the organization and the implementation of the World Cup in football, when many refugees drown on the way to Fortress Europe, or when the worst form of exploitation of racialized labor becomes newspaper articles, racism is not really the problem.

In a previous project on unionized immigrants where the concept of inclusive subordination was introduced, it was in a period when LO and its unions started to understand the importance of the racialized labor market. This study shows a change where the general practice within LO and its unions, but with local and individual exceptions, is to see the fight against racism as a fight against SD, and as a fight against a divided workers' collective. In this practice, not only does structural racism become invisible, but also all the racialized workers who make up 30% of LO's members and just under 40% of the working class.

The results of the projects show that at a time when the LO and its unions are on the defensive, with declining membership and union density, and where class divisions are widening, trade union practice is becoming less creative, more nostalgic, and focused on what is perceived as the core business. This means that issues of racism, discrimination, and forms of diversity in the workplace, as well as a union that represents the background of its members, become less important in practice. While the working class, in general, is becoming more racialized, and racialized segmentation within the working class is increasing, the focus and practice of imagined solidarity that takes into account the diversity and different conditions of the working class is decreasing.

- POSSIBLE NEW RESEARCH QUESTIONS.
The project's focus on the concept of imagined solidarity to explore the trade union movement appears relevant for further research, and three future research projects have emerged. The first, ongoing, through the support of Forte, focuses on broadening from the working class to also capture employees in the so-called middle class, often organized in the central organizations TCO and LO, and where the interest in xenophobic and racist forces and employees with a foreign background is captured with an emphasis on white masculinity.

A second possible project is to explore the understanding of organizations that more directly address racism. The concept challenges the idea of a natural mechanical (automatic) solidarity and argues for the importance of solidarity requiring an active creative process of bridging differences and building “a we”. Translated to anti-racist organizations, it implies the need for an analytical understanding that they must always, both internally and through alliances, bridge competing or even contradictory interests, whether in terms of class, gender, or constructions of who exactly is the racialized other who is subjected to racism (e.g. anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, anti-immigration racism).

A third project idea generated by this study is to capture how racism, xenophobia, and practices around workers with a foreign background relate to the programmatic idea, especially within Lo and its affiliates, of international solidarity. It is about breaking with methodological nationalism and situating the Swedish labor movement and trade union organizations in a global context of capitalism and racism.

- HOW THE PROJECT GROUP HAS DISSEMINATED THE RESEARCH AND RESULTS AND WHETHER AND HOW COLLABORATION HAS TAKEN PLACE.
During the ongoing project, in addition to scientific publications, the work has involved teaching on the bachelor's program Social and Cultural Analysis, the international master's program Ethnic and Migration Studies, and doctoral courses where reflections on and results from the project have been conveyed and discussed. In terms of research, the project has been discussed and results communicated through a number of national and international seminars, workshops, and conferences. Finally, knowledge transfer has also been carried out with the surrounding society, especially trade unions but also study associations. This work has and will continue even after the formal end of the project.