Destruction or Protection? A discursive institutionalist study of the ideas behind the different responses to the Minimum wage directive in Sweden and Finland

Abstract: This study seeks to understand and explain why Sweden and Finland voted differently in the Council of the European Union on the proposal of a minimum wage directive. The two countries share a labor market system, based in collective bargaining and important roles for trade unions and employer organizations, without a legally set minimum wage. At the time, the two countries hade ideologically similar governments, with Prime Ministers from the same party. Moreover, they joined the EU together and before that shared a neutral position between the great powers. Materially, their interests should be similar, and from traditional explanations of government preferences they are expected to act similarly. However, they did not. To understand why this is the case I use the theoretical framework of Discursive Institutionalism and through a Qualitative Content Analysis examine how different ideas were expressed by the governments and key interest organization in the two countries. Notably, the two governments make widely different interpretations of the proposal on minimum wages as do the trade unions. Sweden’s government and trade unions express the idea that a minimum wage directive would destroy the Swedish labor market model, while their Finnish counterparts welcome the Commission’s initiative. The study finds that there are different dominating ideas on European integration in the two countries, and that these ideas take form in different interpretations of the proposal and thus different action in the Council.