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Bringing Capital Back In, or Social Democracy Reconsidered: Employer Power, Cross-Class Alliances, and Centralization of Industrial Relations in Denmark and Sweden
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Abstract
The political domination of Social Democrats in Denmark and Sweden beginning in the 1930s was stabilized by the absence of intense opposition by capital to reformist programs aggressively opposed by business and the Right elsewhere in the world. This quiescence was not a symptom of weakness or dependency; rather, it was a product of a class-intersecting, cross-class alliance behind institutions of centralized industrial relations that served mutual interests of sectoral groupings dominating both union and employer confederations. Well-organized and militant, and backed by Social Democrats, employers in the two countries used offensive multi-industry lockouts to force centralization on reluctant unions. Analysis of these cross-class alliances and their pay-distributional objectives is used to challenge a widely held view that centralization and Social Democratic electoral strength are sources of power against capital. It also occasions a reassessment of conventional understandings of farmer-labor coalitions and the decline of industrial conflict in Scandinavia in the 1930s. According to the alternative view presented here, capital was included rather than excluded from these cross-class alliances, and industrial conflict subsided dramatically in part because employers achieved politically what they had previously tried to achieve with the lockout.
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References
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40 Note that for Sweden much of the 1932 drop in construction wages is attributable to an improvement in the sample of employers reporting wages; the real drop came afterward. Calculations for Denmark are from average hourly earnings for skilled carpenters and metalworkers in Copenhagen, and average daily summer wages are for temporary male agricultural day laborers receiving board. For Sweden, average daily wages are calculated for all industrial workers, skilled and unskilled, and for male temporary day laborers paying their own board (summer only). See also Galenson, (fn. 9), 176–77.Google Scholar
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55 Figures from Det Statistiske Departement, Statistisk Aarbog for Danmark, various years. Denmark's official statistics do not break down lost man-days as do those from Sweden. Korpi and Shalev (fn. 1, 1980) do not discuss their sources, but the deficiencies of official data make it unlikely that they excluded locked-out workers in their measure of “strike involvement.” See also Ingham (fn. 41), 30. All seem to have taken their cue from Arthur M. Ross and Paul T. Hartman, who deliberately combined strikes and lockouts even when they were reported separately; see Ross, and Hartman, , Changing Patterns of Industrial Conflict (New York: Wiley, 1960), 184.Google Scholar The same holds for the comparative analysis of strikes in Shorter, Edward and Tilly, Charles, Strikes in France 1830–1968 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 306–34.Google Scholar
56 After 1955 in Denmark and 1949 in Sweden, official statistics stop reporting lockouts. With the virtual disappearance of lockouts from 1937 onward in Denmark (when Social Democrats began using compulsory arbitration against the unions rather than against employers) and from 1939 onward in Sweden, the respective statistical bureaus stopped reporting them. Figures from Statistiska Centralbyrån, Statistisk årsbok för Sverige, various years; and Det Statistiske Departement, Statistisk Aarbog for Danmark, various years.
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58 Only recently have Americans witnessed such a lockout—in that most American of all industries, baseball.
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