The Confederation, which gathers around 1.5 million employees out of Sweden's 10 million people population, was founded in 1898 by blue-collar unions on the initiative of the 1897 Scandinavian Labour Congress and the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which almost exclusively was made up by trade unions.

A strong contributing factor was the considerably raised fees to union unemployment funds in January 2007 made by the new centre-right government.

[4][5] The fourteen affiliates of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation span both the private and the public sector.

While its Danish sister organisation, the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions, cut its formal ties to the country's Social Democratic party in 1995, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation maintains a strong cooperation with the Social Democrats.

In 1956 social democratic newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen was acquired by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation.