Bringing Capital Back In, or Social Democracy Reconsidered: Employer Power, Cross-Class Alliances, and Centralization of Industrial Relations in Denmark and Sweden

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.

What is Alive and What is Dead in the Theory of Corporatism

“…In contrast with much recent literature that regards them as key (Swenson 1991;Hall and Soskice 2001: 4;Thelen 2003), organized employers did not play a very important role in the emergence of concertative arrangements in Ireland and Italy. In 1987 the Irish employers opposed re-centralization of bargaining.…”

Building Strategic Capacity: The Political Underpinnings of Coordinated Wage Bargaining

“…Nevertheless, whether emphasizing unions (Lange, 1984;Olson, 1982;Schmitter, 1979;Windmuller, 1975) or employers (Swenson, 1989(Swenson, , 1991Wallerstein and Western, 2000), it has long been held that centralized bargaining depends on the ability of peak associations to enforce discipline on their affiliates (i.e., there is a collective action problem). By initially ignoring issues of collective action, the model demonstrates that distributional concerns affect the extent to which confederal organizations will have the capacity to subsequently solve free rider problems.…”

“…2 commonly Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. 2 Rigorous historiography has generated important insights into the role of employers and the dynamics of institutional change (Iversen, 1996;Swenson, 1991;Thelen, 1993Thelen, , 2004, but these insights have not been examined in a broader spatial-temporal context. Golden, Wallerstein and Lange (2002) (2003); Wallerstein (1999) 4 The Wallerstein and Western (2000) findings can be criticized on several grounds.…”

“…The empirical literature to date has primarily relied on case studies of a handful of northern European nations, most commonly Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. 2 Rigorous historiography has generated important insights into the role of employers and the dynamics of institutional change (Iversen, 1996;Swenson, 1991;Thelen, 1993Thelen, , 2004, but these insights have not been examined in a broader spatial-temporal context. Golden, Wallerstein and Lange (2002) and Traxler, Kittel and Blaschke (2001) have invested terrific effort in providing broadly comparable time series data on unions, employers, and government involvement in wage bargaining and economic management for the major OECD economies leading to important work describing the variation in union centralization and bargaining coordination (Ebbinghaus and Visser, 2000;Golden, Wallerstein and Lange, 1999;Traxler, Kittel and Blaschke, 2001;Wallerstein, Golden and Lange, 1997).…”

Organizational Determinants of Wage Moderation

“…55 martin 1984swenson 1991;swank 2001;swank and martin 2001;thelen 2001;swenson 2002;martin andswank 2004. 56 scharpf 1991;streeck 1994;Hassel 2003. come and indirect taxes as well as social security contributions on labor, expressed as percentage of gross domestic product (gdP); unben is a measure of the generosity of unemployment benefits; tots captures terms of trade shocks measured as changes in terms of trade (ratio of export prices to import prices) weighted by the openness of the economy (defined as the ratio between imports plus exports to gdP).…”