A Comparison of Trade Union Education in the Federal Republic of Germany and Sweden

Trade union studies, and worker education in the broader sense, in Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany are almost exclusively sponsored by the trade union movement or institutions closely allied with labor. The independent Working Mens' Institutes and lecture societies organized by progressive, upper middle class educators in the 1880s in Sweden were largely swept away with the organization of the modern labor movement at the turn of the century. Similar worker education associations outside the labor movement were organized in Germany as early as the mid-nineteenth century with programs reminiscent of the British Workers Education Association; but they, too, didn't last.