6 February, 2012
ICEM Nordic Region Vice President Anders Ferbe was elected 1 February by IF Metall’s Executive Board to serve as Acting President of Sweden’s largest industrial union, replacing Stefan Löfven who stepped down 27 January to head the Social Democratic Party of Sweden.
Ferbe, 57, had been IF Metall’s First Vice President since 2008 and has been an ICEM Presidium member since 2007 when he was elected at the Fourth Statutory Congress in Bangkok. He will head the 355,000-member IF Metall going into the union’s 2014 Congress, a key year with federal elections slated to occur in September 2014.
Löfven, President of IF Metall since the union was formed on 1 January 2006 with the merger of the Swedish Industrial Union (Industrifacket) and the Swedish Metalworkers’ Union (Metall), was elected to head the country’s once dominant Social Democrats by the party’s Presidium 11 days ago.
Stefan Löfven
“I am both humbled and honoured by the trust shown me,” Ferbe said following last week’s Board election. “Our job to retain and create sustainable jobs is paramount. It means training, hard work and wages that are both fair and equal.” IF Metall’s board elected Veli-Pekka Säikkälä to replace Ferbe as First Vice President.
Ferbe is a native of Jönköping in southern Sweden and his work in the metal industry began there as an assembler at an industrial fan manufacturer now called Svenska Fläkfabriken.
He held a number of local branch positions of Metall and in 1984, after six months working inside the union’s training center, he took a Metall training and education position in the Stockholm headquarters in environmental education.
In 1989, he began a 16-year career as the union’s press and communications officer and upon the 2006 merger of Industrifacket and Metall, he was elected IF Metall’s Second Vice President. A year earlier, he was elected to the ICEM Executive Committee.
Both Ferbe and Löfven will work to restore the strength of the Social Democratic Party inside Sweden. The Social Democrats were beaten in consecutive elections in 2006 and 2010 and the ICEM is confident that with a trade union leader heading the party, “the Social Democratic Party once again will not only lead Sweden, but continue to serve as the stellar social model for all the world to follow,” said General Secretary Manfred Warda in a 26 January letter congratulating Löfven. (The full ICEM letter is here.)
Löfven, 55, served as Vice President of Metall from 2002 until his election as the first President of IF Metall in 2006. The 55-year-old Löfven had been employed by Metall since 1995, first as a national bargaining officer, then as Secretary, and from 1999 to 2002 as head of the Organising Department.
He was born in Stockholm but grew up in Ådalen, Ångermanland, Sweden. His first industrial job was at a sawmill in Domsjö in 1979, but he then went to work that same year as a welder at the military and all-terrain vehicle manufacturer Hägglunds and Söner AB, now part of UK-based BAE Systems. He started his trade union activism as a shop steward, sector president and branch president.