Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger, and Iben Vyff (eds), Labour, Unions and Politics under the North Star. The Nordic Countries, 1700–2000. New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2017 [International Studies in Social History 28], 328 pp. Flemming Mikkelsen, Knut Kjeldstadli, and Stefan Nyzell (eds), Popular Struggle and Democracy in Scandinavia, 1700–Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2018 [Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology], 457 pp. Jesper Jørgensen and Flemming Mikkelsen (eds), Trade Union Activism in the Nordic Countries since 1900. Cham (CH): Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2023 [Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements], 390 pp.

A recent overview in the Scandinavian Economic History Review informs us that in the past twenty years or so there has been a “renewal” in labour history in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland).Footnote ¹ Thanks to exchanges outside the Nordic sphere and the “global turn” in labour history, new questions have been raised and topics addressed. Growing attention has been paid to the variations of labour and labour relations (including coerced labour), to working lives and the workplace, and to gender. Although the authors also refer to new perspectives on the way workers related to the institutions and parties that claimed to represent them, research on this issue is mentioned only in passing. Nevertheless, the studies reviewed in the present essay testify to the ongoing evolution of labour movement history in the Nordic countries in recent years. The volume on Trade Union Activism (2023) is presented by the editors as an extension of the other two, on Labour, Unions and Politics (2017) and Popular Struggle and Democracy (2018), so it seems appropriate to discuss these in one review essay.

Labour, Unions and Politics comprises several chapters on labour and labour relations. Göran Rydén and Chris Evans provide a brief narrative on Swedish ironmaking in the eighteenth century, with a fascinating coda as they explain how Swedish iron bars were exported to England for the manufacturing of, inter alia, metalwares such as hoes and other tools used on the New World sugar and tobacco plantations and for woodworking. In this way, the Swedish ironworkers appeared to be part of globally connected patterns of labour (including slavery).Footnote ² Ingar Kaldal writes about the identity of “forest men”, the loggers who were important as an occupational group in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and very strong in the labour movements in those countries. They were not only, as the authors claim, one of the main groups supporting the political rise of social democracy, I would add that some of their communities in northern Sweden also became communist strongholds.Footnote ³ There are two chapters on women's labour: one by Malin Nilsson disputing the idea of “housewifization” in the case of domestic workers in Stockholm in the early twentieth century; the other by Helle Stenum comparing the labour of today's Filipino au pairs in Denmark with housemaids in the late nineteenth century.

The unions in the title are less well represented in this volume. Knud Knudsen argues that trade unionism in Denmark between 1870 and 1940 is best studied from a broad perspective including the ideology of work. The chapter reads as a kind of programmatic introduction to his more recent overview of Danish trade unionism in this period.Footnote ⁴ Johan Svanberg discusses the attitude of the Swedish metal workers’ union to the recruitment of migrant labour in the late 1940s. The other chapters are on politics, in one way or another, of which no less than three are on communism. Marko Tikka writes about the importance of the 1905 general strike in Finland (coinciding with that in the Russian Empire to which Finland then belonged) for the formation of the Finnish labour movement. During the strike, the socialists demanded universal suffrage as a condition for political reform, and kept more or less aloof from the nationalists, who wanted to use the strike for their own goals. In another chapter, Sami Suodenjoki describes how the Finnish socialists succeeded in winning the support of the rural population by giving the land issue priority over the national cause.

As is well known, after the turn towards the Popular Front in 1935 the communist parties in the Comintern tried to integrate nationalism into their strategies. Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir describes how this worked out differently in Scandinavian countries, Finland, and Iceland. She argues that a nationalist discourse had earlier roots in Icelandic and Finnish communism, and that this was one of the causes of the relative strength of the communist parties in these countries during the Cold War. In Scandinavian countries (as in many other small European countries), communism became marginalized in this period, after having been relatively successful in combining anti-fascist resistance and the struggle for national independence against Nazi Germany. The Comintern's nationalist turn also meant the end of the underground communication network it had built in northern Europe, as Holger Weiss makes clear in his contribution to this volume. From its headquarters in Hamburg, connections between communist seafarers in the Scandinavian port cities of Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen (and elsewhere) were crucial in this network. In the late 1930s, it was transformed into the so-called Wollweber organization, focusing on sabotage operations against the Nazi regime and its allies. The third chapter on communism (by Chris Holmsted Larsen) is about Danish students at the Moscow Party School in the late 1950s.

In contrast to the rather kaleidoscopic sample of Nordic labour history in Labour, Unions and Politics, the volume Popular Struggle and Democracy in Scandinavia has a clear and unified purpose: its aim is to show how popular movements (not only the labour movement) were essential for the development towards democracy. It does so by providing general overviews of these movements in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Charles Tilly's concept of “repertoires of contention” enabled the authors to incorporate a broad array of manifestations of popular discontent. Tilly argued that changes in the organization of production, urbanization, and state formation in the nineteenth century had a huge impact on the way people organized collectively, from mainly localized forms of protest (“old” repertoires) to the rise of mass political and social movements on a national scale (“new” repertoires). All this can be found in Scandinavian countries as well. Compared with many other European countries, however, collective violence in popular struggles was scarce. The editors claim this can be explained by

They reach this conclusion after extensive descriptions and discussions of “waves” of contention in the three countries. Denmark was privileged in this respect, as the authors Flemming Mikkelsen and René Karpantschof could use their own comprehensive Protest Databases of contentious events, including riots, demonstrations, political meetings, rallies, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and other collective action, covering the period 1700–2005. The chapters on Sweden and Norway could not be based on such a systematic source. Written by several expert authors, they are no less informative however. Although the editors stress that popular struggles were not the same in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, others might (as I do) conclude differently: despite significant national contextual differences, such as the late independence of Norway (1905) or the neutrality of Sweden during World War II, the larger picture is that the character and timing of contentious movements in these countries had much in common, as they likewise had with such events in other European countries. The underlying question in the book – why was the outcome in Scandinavian countries different from the rest of Europe – cannot, in my view, be explained by fundamental national differences or Sonderwegs in the history of contentious popular movements in these countries.

In his essay on peasant rebellions and urban riots in Sweden from 1740, Mart Berglund reports that some historians have discerned a special “Swedish culture of negotiation during the early modern period”, in contrast to other European peoples. The theme returns in the chapter on postwar contentious politics in Sweden by Abby Peterson, Håkan Thörn, and Mattias Wahlström, who argue that the construction of the Swedish corporatist model of industrial relations under the social-democratic governments since the 1930s “was firmly rooted in the political culture of the popular movements during the early phase of industrialisation”. This “consensus culture” involved “certain shared, pre-existing taken-for-granted values, norms and standards” (pp. 379–380). The argument of such a Swedish historical exceptionalism emerged during the 1990s, but is not uncontroversial.Footnote ⁵ It is reminiscent of the idea of a specific Dutch “polder model”, also based on the idea that peaceful industrial relations in the Netherlands had historical origins in age-old traditions of negotiation and compromise.Footnote ⁶

What is overlooked in these supposedly “national” origins is that the system of industrial relations in these countries had much in common with a general (continental) European pattern of (neo)corporatism. In an overview, Stefan Berger discerned three types: an authoritarian type in fascist states like Spain and Portugal (and earlier in Nazi Germany, Italy, and Vichy France), a social-democratic type in Scandinavian countries, and a combined social-democratic and Christian-democratic type in countries such as the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, Belgium, and the Netherlands.Footnote ⁷ So, neither Sweden nor the Netherlands were that special after all. More convincingly, Knut Kjeldstadli concludes in the Norwegian case (where there is talk of a similar “Norwegian model” of peaceful industrial relations) that class cooperation had no roots in Norwegian history, which was “more conflict-ridden than often is assumed” (p. 236), but originated in the 1930s in a compromise between three classes – workers, represented by the social-democratic labour movement, peasants, represented by the Farmers’ Party, and employers in the Norwegian Employers’ Organization – which enabled the social-democrats to govern in the years to come. In the 1930s, national labour market agreements were concluded between parties in other Scandinavian countries as well. What came to be called the Nordic model of industrial relations was initiated in this period. A similar argument can be made for the Dutch case, where the corporatist institutionalization of industrial relations originated not in an age-old tradition but in a postwar compromise between the social-democratic and confessional (mainly Catholic) parties and unions.

The ideologues of specific national historical roots of (neo)corporatism ignored the tensions and workers’ struggles that at times undermined the cosiness of class cooperation. There are many examples in the volume Popular Struggle and Democracy of union action challenging the industrial peace of the Scandinavian corporatist models, mostly initiated by rank-and-file movements. As in other European countries, strike activity was particularly high in the years just after World War II, and again in the 1960s and 1970s, especially after 1968, when class conflict resurged also in Scandinavian countries.Footnote ⁸ In hindsight, the industrial peace of the Swedish, Norwegian, or for that matter Dutch, models of industrial relations lasted only thirty years or so.Footnote ⁹

The volume Trade Union Activism in the Nordic Countries is a welcome addition to this argument. The “activism” in the title is crucial, as this volume is not about trade unions as institutions, or about the institutional arrangements in which they participated, but about the activism and movements of trade unionists – sometimes with, sometimes against the unions. These stories run counter to established myths of the so-called Nordic model of peaceful and consensual industrial relations mentioned above. The book's aims are, firstly, to study “the mobilization strategies of trade union activists and their organizations, formal or informal, and how they interacted with other major collective actors such as social movements, political parties, and governments”, and secondly “to deconstruct the prevalent perception of the Nordic trade union movement as being a stable and homogeneous body”. In critical situations, mobilization by “alternative forms of organization significantly affected labour market relations and the political system” (pp. 1–2).

The editors of this volume prefer to call this “social movement unionism”, a term borrowed from sociological social movement research, which in their view is perfectly applicable to the history of trade union activism as well. This kind of workers’ activism developed in waves. The above-mentioned central agreements in the 1930s stabilized industrial relations in the Nordic countries after periods of massive strikes and lockouts. The “social contracts” generally worked well until the end of the 1960s, with interruptions by strikes in the aftermath of World War II in Sweden and especially Denmark, and by major strikes in Denmark, Norway, and Finland in 1956. The international strike wave after “May 1968” reached the Nordic countries with a vengeance. From the late 1960s, the number of strikes and strikers in Denmark and Sweden, and especially Finland, rocketed. In Norway, the increase was more moderate. Strike activity declined after the mid-1980s, but remained high compared with other European countries. Most of the strikes were unofficial and relied on “action networks”, supported by groups outside the mainstream labour unions and parties. The 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of militant public sector unions, which in the first few decades of the twenty-first century became more strike prone than unions in private industries.

The book is organized in three parts. The first is about union activism, strikes, and lockouts leading up to the general agreements in the 1930s. Finn Olstad's chapter on local activism and trade union opposition in Norway ends with what he calls “the final showdown”: a massive lockout in 1931, which involved 60,000 workers for five months. It caused “a kind of war fatigue”, and a need felt by the union leadership to control the local activism of the communist trade union opposition. This formed the basis of an understanding with the employers. “The fear of losing control […] prompted the employers to make concessions to support the central union strategy and preserve the dominance of the national leadership of the unions” (p. 65). Knud Knudsen highlights the important role of syndicalists in Denmark in the years after World War I, putting pressure on the social-democratic trade union leadership by organizing strikes from below. After 1920, the syndicalist opposition was absorbed by communism (like syndicalists elsewhere) and disappeared. Martin Ericsson and Stefan Nyzell analyse anti-strike breaker protest in interwar Sweden. These protests culminated in 1931 in the killing of four striking workers by police in Ådalen in northern Sweden. It was an “iconic moment” in Swedish labour history, “often described as a turning point, where Sweden left the social conflicts of the 1920s and instead choose cooperation and peaceful solutions on the labour markets, the so-called Swedish model” (pp. 111–112).

The second part of the book is on trade union activism after 1940. Flemming Mikkelsen applies the concept of social movement unionism to two strike waves in Denmark in 1943–1946 and 1968–1985. In the 1930s, central labour market agreements had “reduced member influence [and] widened the gap between top and bottom in the trade union movement”, but during the German occupation and its aftermath “decisions concerning labour market regulations moved once again to the workplace and to the labour union opposition, this time with the Communists in a leading role” (pp. 136–137). Workers continued to strike and demonstrate for higher wages after the end of the war until 1947, when collective bargaining became more centralized again. This strike wave is analysed in depth by Jesper Jørgensen in a chapter on labour protest and trade union activism in post-war Copenhagen.

The strike wave in Denmark in the 1970s is analysed by Mikkelsen on the basis of a database of 2,986 strikes in 1976–1979, compiled by students and researchers at Århus University. He highlights the role of local rank-and-file and joint shop-steward committees in organizing these strikes. Several coordinating bodies of shop stewards emerged, of which the Foreman Initiative (Formandsinitiativet) was the most important. This second part also includes chapters on labour militancy in the 1970s in Norway (by Idar Helle) and Finland (by Tapio Bergholm). Knut Kjeldstadli writes about attempts by the Oslo construction workers’ union to incorporate migrant workers in the early 2000s.

The third part of this volume comprises comparative studies of lockouts in Scandinavia between 1890 and 1938 (by Jesper Hamark), on wildcat strikes in Germany and Denmark (by Peter Birke), and public sector unionism in Scandinavia (by Laust Høgedahl). In the final chapter, at last, gender is incorporated, in a study of the struggle to close the gender pay gap in Iceland and Sweden (by Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir and Silke Neunsinger).

By way of conclusion, we may ask what these Nordic studies contribute to labour movement history research more generally. To study the history of trade unions as social movements is not completely new, but the way these volumes add to this approach is extremely valuable. I think the value is threefold: firstly, by linking trade union activism to a more encompassing struggle for democracy; secondly, by highlighting social conflict in supposedly consensual societies; and, thirdly, by introducing the concept of social movement unionism. Acknowledging the important role of workers’ militancy in union activism, this concept enables us to overcome the rather sterile dichotomy of the Trotskyist doctrine of “rank-and-file vs. bureaucracy”, which has long been waiting to be replaced by something more fruitful.Footnote ¹⁰