Thursday, June 27, 2013
C2.17 (Oudemanhuispoort)
For much of the postwar period, Sweden was one of the best examples of stable, successful corporatist bargaining. The luster came off the Swedish model, indeed it appeared close to collapse, for a period from the mid-1980s until the mid-1990s. Yet collective regulation survived this period of crisis, and employers, unions and state actors reconstructed a system of industrial relations that looks very familiar: coordinated multi-industry bargaining; self regulation by employers and unions; low strike levels. On the surface, Sweden appears to have largely resisted the liberalization of industrial relations institutions. It would be plausible to interpret recent developments in Swedish industrial relations through the lens of path dependence, incremental change, and approaches to comparative political economy that emphasize the resilience of national models of capitalism in the face of liberalizing and globalizing pressures. This paper offers an alternative interpretation of the recent evolution of Swedish industrial relations, one which signals a fundamental change in the manner in which Swedish class relations are regulated and which identifies an important liberalizing trajectory in the practice of industrial relations, even as many of its institutions remained distinct. Swedish industrial relations have in fact been transformed in the last fifteen years, in part through the creation of new institutions, but more through changes in the practice and functioning of existing institutions. Swedish bargaining institutions have been subject to a remarkable degree of “institutional conversion” as they have come to encourage decentralized wage setting, and a high degree of individualization and labor market flexibility.
