The Origins of the Swedish Wage Bargaining Model

Abstract

This paper revisits the development of the canonical Swedish wage bargaining model, from the 1930s to the 1950s. The question at the core of the debate is: how did Sweden achieve “good” wage bargaining institutions - good, in the sense of facilitating investment, employment, and controlled inflation? The conventional account focuses on the actions of employers and trade unions in export industry, and a cross-class alliance between the two. This paper questions this account. The paper builds on archival sources in the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library in Stockholm: the minutes from the main trade union confederation’s yearly wage policy discussions, in preparation for bargaining rounds. In total, some 1,500 pages of wage policy discussion. I find that the export sector cross-class alliance played a very small role, and that macro-corporatist concerns, that the labour movement had to take responsibility of all of society and pursue a planned wage policy, was much more important. This has theoretical implications for the analysis of wage bargaining institutions in general and the Swedish model in particular.