WHEN Sofia Appelgren, a young entrepreneur, opened her salad bar in Sweden’s second largest city, Gothenburg, last year she thought the main obstacle she might encounter was that not enough people would come.

She need not have worried about that, but never did she imagine that her little company, Wild’n’Fresh, would attract the wrath of union militants who have been picketing the place for the past month.

They want the salad bar, which employs only two or three people — it depends on how busy things are — to sign a collective bargaining agreement. “They’ve said if I don’t sign, they will bankrupt me,” said Appelgren, 24. “But my employees are not union members and don’t want to be.”

She added that she paid her workers more than the minimum demanded by the unions. “Why can’t the unions just leave us alone?” This young mother’s defiance of heckling union heavies has turned her into a heroine for Swedes in favour of reform. It has also put her salad bar on the front line of a battle over the dominance of unions that has overshadowed the first weeks in office of Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s youngest prime minister in eight decades.

Defeat of the long-ruling social democrats in September by Reinfeldt, 41, and his reform-minded centre-right alliance was an earthquake by Sweden’s usually placid political standards.

The aftershocks have been reverberating through the country ever since: on December 14, thousands of workers protested in the streets against a government plan to encourage more people to work by reducing famously generous unemployment benefits.

Then came what they are calling the “salad bar blockade”. It began after Appelgren received — and ignored — a letter from the hotel and restaurant workers’ union.

“They threatened to make my life miserable unless I signed their agreement,” she said. A few days later a group of union activists turned up at the bar.

“They’ve been there for a month now, sometimes up to 20 of them,” she said. “They hand out leaflets to customers, telling them not to come in. They try to intimidate us.”

Two union men stood outside Wild’n’Fresh last week wearing red waistcoats to show they were part of an official picket. One of them, who introduced himself by the name of Par, accused Appelgren of abusing her workers. “Unless we stand up for the workers,” he insisted, “our system of security and solidarity will be swept away.”

People were not paying him much heed. On the contrary, the picketing has produced a surge of public sympathy for Appelgren. It has also produced a new word, studata, meaning “to eat out of solidarity”, an activity that is boosting Appelgren’s sales.

Appelgren’s plight as a union punchbag may help to explain why the Swedes, who have cradle-to-grave welfare, are the Europeans least likely to start their own business, according to surveys.

Reinfeldt’s measures to reform the welfare system appear to have put the unions on the defensive. That, at least, is why Appelgren believes they are picking on such a seemingly insignificant target as her.

“I think they worry that, if I don’t sign, it might catch on and nobody else will bother to sign any more either,” she said. The blockade, however, appears to be backfiring. Appelgren has received hundreds of messages of support, some from union members.

Appelgren seemed in no mood to give in. “They’ve said they will stand there until we sign, but we’re not going to sign. So they’ll probably be standing there for ever,” she giggled.

At the same time, she has learnt an important lesson. She said that she and her boyfriend, an estate agent, were planning eventually to set up a company overseas, perhaps even in Britain. “I’ve heard things are a lot easier there,” she said.

So much for the vaunted Swedish model.

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