Solidarity across Classes: The Swedish Employers' Mass Lockouts and the Spirit of Saltsjöbaden

Abstract

Conventional thinking about the 1938 Basic Agreement at Saltsjobaden between organized labor and capital in Sweden holds that it was one of the consequences of a shift in the balance of power between workers and employers to the latter’s disadvantage. But detailed archival evidence and analysis shows that it was in fact part and parcel of an evolving cross-class alliance of unions and employer associations primarily in export and other traded goods sectors against militant and high-paid workers in sheltered sectors, especially the building and construction trades. Those relatively high wages were earned at the expense of workers producing traded goods, especially in engineering. Evidence about employers’ use of the multi-sectoral sympathy lockouts to bring both labor peace and cross-sectoral wage uniformity indicates that the unions dominating the labor confederation actually welcomed the militant interventions, whose main purpose was to give them a legitimate pretext to intervene against and discipline militancy and wage setting in the sheltered sectors. Details in and about the 1938 Basic Agreement confirm the argument about a growing cross-class alliance between capital and labor, not a shift in the balance of power.