Rudolf Meidner

Rudolf Alfred Meidner, born June 23 1914 in Breslau, Silesia, died December 9 2005 in Lidingö, Sweden.

Son of Alfred Meidner and Elise Bandmann. Being Jewish and a Socialist he was forced to flee Nazi Germany after the Reichstag fire in Berlin 1933. In 1937 he was married to Ella Jörgenssen. He became a citizen of Sweden in 1943.

He was an economist and the developer of the employee funds as they were proposed by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation in the 1970s. He got his PhD in 1954 with a dissertation labeled "Swedish Working Market at Full Employment".

He spent most of his work life at the Swedish Trade Union Confederation as a researcher.

Meidner and another economist, Gosta Rehn, were responsible for the Rehn-Meidner model for economic growth as promulgated by the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartiet, or SAP) and the blue-collar trade union, the LO (Landsorganisationen). The Rehn-Meidner model was first proposed in 1951, and for over the next 25 years was the basis for the high wage, low wage differential, high concentration of capital (substitution of capital for labour) Swedish economy, which also was exposed to international trade and eventually became export oriented. Rudulf Meidner caused controversy in 1976 when the LO published his proposal to require all companies above a certain size to issue new stock shares to workers, so that within 20 years the workers would control 52% of the companies they worked in. This created friction and was one reason the ruling SAP party lost support in the early 1980s.

The Rehn-Meidner model resulted in Sweden having a very egalitarian wage system, so that wage differentials between professions was very low, resulting in a low Gini coefficient. However, it may have resulted in capital concentration (despite popular perceptions and a very active social policy, Sweden has one of the highest percentages of private ownership of capital in the world) to the point where in the late 1970s, 25% of share capital was held by the top 0.1% of shareholders and 75% by the top 10%.

References'

Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Newman (Oxford University Press 2005)