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Docks and Defeat – The 1909 General Strike in Sweden and the Shipping Ports Problem
Jesper Hamark & Christer Thörnqvist
Introduction
Swedish trade unions’ most devastating defeat ever was the General Strike in 1909. In response to several lockouts, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) launched a general strike in August that year, covering most industries. The decision was taken by the LO leadership without first consulting its affiliates or individual members. Yet, in the words of Bäckström (1977: 104) a central decision had never been so enthusiastically supported by the rank-and-file.An obvious rationale for industrial action, both strikes and lockouts, is to hit the counterpart financially. The General Strike succeeded in shutting down all core export industries more or less completely. Hence,one might think that the struck employers and their associations should have been most eagerto settle the conflict with LO, even at the costs of a peace arrangement mostly on the workers’ terms. Yet instead the General Strike ended in a landslide victory for the organizing employers’ association, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF).The strike was just not powerful enough. There are severalfactorsbehind the lack of efficiency. In this paper, however, we focus on the transportation system, an aspectof utmost importance for the outcome of the strike, but still, we believe, somewhat underestimated. The railway workers did not take part in the strike for legislative reasons – a well-known and often discussed weakness of the strike.Even more crucial, however, was most likely the lack of labour resistance in the docks. Although production was almost completely shut down in the export industries, goods from these industries were still exported through the ports. Consequently, SAF got a huge financial relief in a situation where it otherwise would have been under strong pressure.
It has been argued that the dock workers suffered organizational strength after several conflicts in the preceding years (cf. Schiller 1964). Yet, the impact of the ‘dockworker problem’ has never been thoroughly investigated; how weak was the organization really?In the ports, the dockers had challenged employers’prerogatives for two decades; they were the backbone of the Transport Workers’ Union (Transport), whose well-organized members at the time were looked upon as the ‘storm troopers’ of the Swedish working class. But during the largest battle ever between labour and capital, the ports arguably became the labour movement’s weakest link. Thispaperdiscusses the puzzling fact that export flourished despite that a majority of the dockers actually were on strike. We alsodiscuss the role of LO. How could the confederation proclaim a general strike, but not care more for the labour resistance in the ports – arguablythe most important strategic nodes?
The nextsection gives a brief overview ofthe strike.Thereafter we outline a few theoretical aspects necessary for the further analysis. The following section gives a background to some particularities of the Swedish harbours at the time, while the section after that discusses the core of this paper.
The Strike
Aiming to carry through national collective agreements on companies’ terms, SAF launched several lookouts in July 1909. It was in response to these lockouts LO called a general strike.Contemporary sources bear witness of the great faith the Swedish labour movement had in the transport workers, and also of the fear felt by the employers. In May 1902 there had been a general strike for universal suffrage. The strike was proclaimed by political parties, the Social Democrats in cooperation with the Liberals, and not by the trade unions, which however were officially affiliated to the social democratic party at the time. The strike was only two days long (it was never attempted to last longer)but through its strength and mass support,it made a great impact on the present right-wing government. Suffrage reforms did not take off immediately after the 1902 strike, but it was no doubt important for the fall of the hegemony that said that only rich people should have the right to vote.REF!Encouraged by the great support in the 1902 strike, there were encompassing discussions within the labour movement about using the general strike again, andfor perhaps even more far-reaching purposes. In those discussions, transport workers were seen as a key group (Schiller 1967: 216). Charles Lindley, legendary chairman ofTransport, writesin his political memoires that
in that time [the turn of the last century] there was an almost unlimited faith in the general strike as the decisive means to get universal suffrage, and in this battle transport workers were seen as the storm troopers. There were even prominent persons within the social democratic party who thought that it would be enough to take out the transport workers alone in a national strike, to solve the issue of the right to vote (Lindley 1977: 62).
Even though Lindley does not refer to dockworkers in particular, we can assume that they were the key group: at the time, dockers constituted the majority of the organized transport workers. The employers were also aware of the importance of the ports. In 1911,that is, after the General Strike, SAF summarized its experience from the preceding years, stating that the economic losses from work stoppages in longshoring were ‘enormous’, and that society ‘by all possible means must try to keep business in the ports going’(Hallendorff 1927: 188).
In 1909, LO hoped for a short, but ‘devastating’ conflict – a wishthat showed to be futile. Beginning on the 4th of August, the general strike continued a full month, until the 4th of September.At its peak, 300,000 workers were on strike. But with no victory in sight, LO then started to retreat. Even though minor strike actions continued, the battle was already lost and in this paper we will focus on the period of full-scale conflict. The agreement eventually settled, was in total accordance with SAF’s original demands (Schiller 1964; 1967).
Such a landslide victory for the employers in such an enormous showdown could not be easily explained away by the LO leadership. Swedish economy was in a recession, a fact that spoke strongly in favour of the employers. But there are a number ofother reasons for the workers’ defeat. LO’s strike funds weremeager, and its leaders declared that no relief would be given the members during the fight. Even though this decision was not followedto 100 per cent in practice, many workers with families suffered greathardships during the conflict. The pressure evenoccasionally led workers to commit ‘the greatest sin of all’, namely strike breaking.LO made a non-controversial choice of not including health-care personnel in the conflict, but its decisiontonothit at the supply of electricity, waterand street sweeping, and even animal care, were met by a storm of protests from its affiliated trade unions and workers all over the country. Or in popular parlor, ‘…since the employers never have taken any consideration of our children, why should we take care of their animals?’. Additionally, when the typographers – who were not affiliated to LO – joined the strikeon the 9th of August, ambivalent liberals turned against the workers.As the liberals saw it, the strike now had become an attack on the freedom of speech and thus they joined the right-wing chorus of condemnation.Especially Schiller (1967) has stressed the importance of the liberals’ position vis-à-vis the strike.Further, as mentioned, the railway workers did not take part in the strike for legislative reasons (Schiller 1964; 1967). Their trade union was not affiliated to LO, but their participation in the strike was still subject to endless controversies. The railway workers’ decision not to join the strike definitely facilitated transportations, but on the positive side for striking workers, the railway men could – and in fact did – contribute to the strike funds.
LO’s strike proclamation is worth noting, and we will return tothis rather controversial issue inour concluding discussion.SAF had recurrently challenged LO with massive lockouts in the preceding years, and LO had not been able to respond in a powerful way. By that, the employers had secured managerial supremacy. The LO leaders were afraid that SAF would just continue its lockout strategy, if it was never met with strong resistance. By extending the stoppage of work from the realms of SAF to the entire labour market,[1] LO aimed for a short, but extremely powerful action that would not drain its meager strike fund. Moreover, there was a massive grass-root pressure from workers all over the country on LO to proclaim a strike (Schiller 1967: 226-35).But apart from the perceived necessity to strike back against SAF, did LO formulate any offensive, positivedemands? The answer is a simple ‘no’. In the words of Schiller (1967: 259):
From the beginning the General Strike was not planned to be a prolonged starvation war but a blitzkrieg. The sudden chock that would hit society, would force it to intervene and enforce an acceptable peace arrangement for the workers.Society as such would not be threatened, since the strike should be non-revolutionary in character.
With a government intervention as the ultimate objective for the strike, it is easier to understand LO’s reluctance to extend the conflict to water supply and other societal areas. As the LO leaders saw it, the liberals were needed as a mediating partner between the right-wing government and the labour movement’s political branch, the Social Democratic Party. Hence the liberals should not to be scared away. Schiller (1967: 260) again:
To its form the General Strike became a compromise. The exceptions were simultaneously too few and to many: too few to prevent the liberal opinion to be scared off,or in rage join the right and the employers – foremost due to the typographers’ strike, but also because of other, real or putative, breach of contracts. At the same time there was one exception too many: the railway men. During an economic crisis with huge piled up stocks of finished goods waiting for transport, this had a profound impact.
Schiller’s last remark easily applies to the docks as well.
Workers’ power: a brief theoretical outline
Eric Olin Wright (2000: 962) distinguishes between two different kinds of workers’ bargaining power – associational and structural power. Associational power ‘includes such things as unions and parties, but may also include a variety of other forms, such as works councils or forms of institutional representation of workers on boards of directors in schemes of worker codetermination, or even, in certain circumstances, community organizations’. Structural power, on the other hand, ‘results simply from the location of workers within the economic system’.This is further developed by Beverly Silver (2003: 13), who divides structural power into marketplace bargaining power and workplace bargaining power. In Silver’s words, ‘marketplace bargaining power might be the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, low levels of general unemployment, and the ability of workers to pull out of the labour market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income’.On the other hand, workplace bargaining power ‘accrues to workers who are enmeshed in tightly integrated production processes, where a localized work stoppage in a key node can cause disruptions on a much wider scale than the stoppage itself’.
Silver’s description of workplace bargaining power is close to what Luca Perrone (1984) called positional power or disruptive potential, defined as the output lost if a strike would occur.We argue – and we are not the first to do so – that dock workers are among the groups of workers possessing the highest disruptive potential or workplace bargaining power, a fact as true today as it was a hundred years ago.In the Swedish context this is particularly clear. Sweden is geographically located at the ScandinavianPeninsula; the overwhelming bulk of foreign trade had, and still has, to go through the ports. Hence, if work stops in the ports, import and export break down immediately; the ports are certainly what might be called key nodes. In addition, the dockers were highly unionized compared to other Swedish workers; that is, their associational power was considerable as well.
Perrone used the concept disruptive potential – congenially operationalized as interdependence between different industrial sectors – mainly to explain relative wages. His most important result – a positive link between disruptive potential and wages in Italy in the 1970s – has been furtheredbyWallace and colleagues (1989), drawing on data from the USA.Our focus here is not the day-to-day class conflicts fostered by capitalism. But we think that workers with high workplace bargaining power, and thus in the position of forcing relatively high wages, also are key actors in mostsocial conflicts between labour and capital,with the 1909 General Strike as a crucial example.In one sense it could be argued that the full disruptive potential is unleashed in such conflicts, because they are‘all-in’ situations where laws and regulations often matter less than the present strength between the classes. This could for instance be contrasted to the situation in the US ports on the West Coast today, where the dockers’ union, ILWU, is so powerful that it is subject to the constant threat of being put under the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which would severely curb the possibility to strike (Talley 2004: 216).
This raises the question of the distinctions between conflicts of interests and conflicts of rights, which was important in the Swedish General Strike too. LO hoped to get a legal interference from the government in order to stop the conflict.Normally, though, it is the opposite: trade unions’ bargaining power is stronger without the meddling of legislative rules. The more items on the labour market agenda that could be concerned matters of interests, the easier it would be for trade unions to benefit from their bargaining power.
The strike(s) and the workers’ power
Some importantstatistical facts about the General Strike
Regarding the General Strike’s disruptive power, we limit ourselves to SAF’s three core export industries: iron and steel, timber, and paper and pulp.There is no monthly statistics of industrial production for the time of interest. Yet according to Schiller (1964: 186), the men still working during the strike were too few to maintain the production, which thus was shut down almost completely. However, there is a twist: export from these same industries did not vanish.
Table 1: Export in August 1909. Physical volumes
As percentage of export in / Iron and steel / Timber / Paper and pulpAugust 1908 / 62,7 / 58,2 / 57,3
July 1909 / 44,2 / 56,2 / 47,4
Source: Schiller 1964, p.188.
Depending on which benchmark one uses, 50 to 60 per cent of the regular export volumes were still exported in August 1909.If we split up the statistics on the most important ports, export figures looked like this:
Table 2: Export in August 1909 as a percentage of export in July 1909. Iron and steel, timber and paper pulp in the most important ports. Physical volumes
Iron and steel / Timber / Paper and pulpGothenburg / 46.9 / 35.2 / 48.6
Stockholm / 53.7 / n/a / n/a
Gävle / 18.8 / 15.0 / 51.5
Sundsvall / n/a / 26.0 / 67.2
Härnösand / n/a / 64.6 / 26.3
Örnsköldsvik / n/a / 83.0 / 81.9
Umeå / n/a / 84.3 / 55.5
In total / 44.2 / 56.2 / 47.4
Source: Schiller 1964, p.190-191.
So, what kind of goods was exported if production was shut down?As mentioned, the strike occurred in the midst of a recession and great stocks had been piled up – stocks that the capitalists now could sell out, which spoke strongly in favour of the employers.
As an explanation to the flourishing export – apart from piled up stocks – earlier research has hintedthat there must have been lots of strike breakers in the ports, and that the dockers and their union were demoralized at the time LO proclaimed the strike (Olsson 1975: 21; Schiller 1964: 190-91)[2], due to a heavy loss in a long and violent nationwide conflict in the ports the preceding years.
In brief, this is what had passed: in the so-called 1906 December Compromise, LO recognized the employers’ exclusive right to hire and fire, and to manage and distribute work, or in the capitalistjargon, the ‘freedom of work’, while in return SAF formally recognized workers’ right to join unions and to let unions negotiate over wages and working conditions on behalf of its individual members. Transport – affiliated to LO and constituted largely by dockers – nevertheless refused the December Compromise. In the ports, overcrowded by people looking for a few hours of work, it was always possible for employers to set aside union members, not by firing them but more subtly by not hiring. Therefore Transport could not accept the ‘freedom of work’ (Lindley 1977: 173).