A sentence of sorts in Stockholm

I spent the last month or so editing a friend's MA thesis, which deals with how the Swedish model of labour relations responded to a European Court of Justice ruling that effectively negated some of its core provisions. My final commentary:

From my perspective, it seemed that it had the potential to ask (and answer) three quite interesting questions:

1) How do labour market institutions react to an external shock, and why do they react in that way?
2) What is the relationship between institutions and actors? Are actors only empowered within specific institutions, or are institutions only maintained through the work of actors? Alternatively, is there a sort of feedback loop between the two?
3) Under what conditions is it possible for a unified working-class movement to maintain hegemony in the face of neoliberalism?

I think that you did a quite good job, overall, in answering these questions in the Swedish case. Your clearest focus was on the first question, but I think that you presented the second as an important part of the narrative in the last three chapters. I think that you let the third slip away from you slightly - from related conversations I can tell that you're aware of the implications of your work for that question, but it's remained slightly below the text. To lift Derrida's phrase, like the spectre of Marx... a phantasmal half-presence in your work.

Returning to the second question, I would make two points. The first is that actors are, to some extent, given power only due to the existence of institutions. For example, even a politically conscious working class will not be able to press its claims without some connection to a "friendly" institution - whether a political party, labour union, or state bureaucracy. (The tragedy of the working class in the US is also the story of Reagan's union-breaking in the 1980s and the working class's marginalization in a newly neoliberal Democratic Party. Once state and political institutions were captured by capitalist interests, and unions marginalized, the long wage stagnation was bound to happen.)

The second is that actors also have power bases that rest outside of institutions. For example, a union's power rests not in its head office but in its membership and social legitimacy; a competent lobbying group is no use if they have no money to contribute to political campaigns.

Mapping this onto the Swedish example, we can see the following:
(a) Unions were strong in membership (largely due to their key place in wage bargaining, provision of unemployment insurance, etc) and ideologically united around "working class interests" defined in a broad sense.
(b) Pre-Laval-Case institutions (the Swedish model of industrial relations) created a strong bargaining position for unions due to rules around wage formation, industrial action and sympathy action.
(c) The ECJ ruling effectively negated those institutions, or at least threatened to progressively undermine them through an inflow of foreign labour.

What you observed was that, after having their institutional underpinnings knocked away from under them, the unions pressed successfully for the reconstruction of a distinct Swedish model that would continue to empower them. That is, their strength didn't solely depend upon the existing institutional relationships. (Although it sounds like tactical savvy and institutional ties were helpful in winning some key debates!) Rather, their ability to reconstitute the Swedish model relied upon other factors. It would be productive to investigate what those factors were - membership? social legitimacy or hegemony? money? or something else?

This leads neatly onto the third question that I identified in this study. More broadly, this is a question about class, which is a notoriously difficult topic.

I noticed that you tended to soft-pedal class divisions in your analysis. You often said things like "Social partners wanted X", or "They thought that Y", without really defining which particular social partners wanted X, etc. This might be a legitimate approach insofar as social gulfs seem a lot narrower in Sweden, and solidarity between the social partners much more valued. However, it did sometimes hamper your approach to the underlying issues of class solidarity and cross-class alliances.

Let me first say that I think that the notion of two distinct and inevitably opposed classes is both analytically helpful and analytically ridiculous. Yes, in a broad sense, it's true that some people buy labour-power for money in the hopes of profiting, and that most people sell their labour-power in order to buy the means of subsistence. In that sense, a division between "labour" and "capital" is helpful.

On the other hand, there may be other classes in action as well, ranging from precapitalist formations such as smallholding peasantry and landed aristocracy to modern-day inventions such as state bureaucracy. (That's us!) In the Swedish case, the state-sector employers association might be considered to be one of these "other classes" - for as your study showed, its interests deviated significantly from those of the private-sector employer groups. It was significantly more willing to place social solidarity in front of lower wage bills - maybe because it was beholden to voters (most of whom were workers) rather than share owners.

Furthermore, classes are seldom if ever homogenous. The remarkable thing about the Swedish case, to my mind, is not that the bourgeoisie was divided, but that labour was so united. This point is clearer if you consider that the Swedish "proletariat" is composed of a variety of distinct groups with distinct interests, represented by two separate peak level organizations. Here, the contrast with the US, which you mentioned to me early on, is instructive. In the US, labour is essentially split down the middle, between high-wage, high-skill employees (think doctors and lawyers) who have been very effective in organizing for their own interests and low-wage, low-skill employees (think most of the service sector) who remain disorganized and relatively unrepresented. The former group is quite capable of lobbying for its own sake, but has little interest in solidarity with the latter.

I think that there are a few potentially fruitful avenues for exploration lurking within this suspicious language about class. It would be interesting to trace the origins of these groups' interests. In particular, why are government employers committed to maintaining the Swedish model when private-sector employers aren't? And how and why have the two labour organizations shared a long-term commitment to that model when they represent quite different interests? Once again, this would require an investigation of the social basis of each group - in the most simplistic sense, who are their members, and what do those people think? I suspect that there is an element of path-dependency here - if professionals and blue-collar workers initially organized together, they might have built lasting ties that did not exist in (say) the US.

Kelvin will submit it on Tuesday, after an intense weekend of revisions. Well done!