Labor movement (Sweden)
The labor movement is one of the three great Swedish popular movements of the 19th century .
requirements
The labor movement emerged as a reaction to the new social conditions in the wake of industrialization . Even if Sweden never experienced the misery of English industrial cities, the situation of the workers was difficult. The working day usually comprised between 10 and 12 working hours. Women's and child labor was widespread and the number of accidents at work was about twice that of agriculture. The wages were often at or below the subsistence level.
There were considerable differences between different groups of workers. The smelting works and ironworks had the best conditions . They paid half wages to the sick and pensions to old workers. Large families were supported and some companies also built workers' housing. A large part of the wages was paid in kind, however, which lasted until the turn of the century. The sawmill and forest workers as well as the factory workers in the cities had it worst.
precursor
The first initiatives came from the intellectual and petty-bourgeois sectors. Educational circles and workers' associations were organized based on the German model, but in which the workers were in the minority. Ideologically, these initiatives were shaped by a religiously shaped humanism, which - if there was any political opinion at all - went in a liberal direction.
Of greater importance to the emergence of the Swedish labor movement were the self-help organizations that were formed in the 1850s and 1860s. Health insurances emerged in different places, which later merged in a nationwide health insurance movement. In 1910, about 13% of the adult population was covered by these health insurances. A second self-help organization were the consumer cooperatives, which were based on the British model and merged in 1899 to form the cooperative association Kooperativa Förbundet (KF) . The aim was to combat monopoly tendencies in trade and thus to be able to offer workers cheaper goods. The battle was tough at times and could only be won when the consumer cooperative began to produce important goods itself in order to ensure supplies to its own stores.
The labor movement
The breakthrough for the labor movement came in the 1880s when a wave of strikes broke out in Norrland due to sharp wage cuts. The largest strike to date, with around 5,000 strikers, broke out in Sundsvall in 1879 , whereupon the authorities had the strike camp surrounded by the military and forced the strikers to return to their jobs. As a result of the lost strikes, a union movement emerged . At the end of the 1880s, the local trade union associations merged into nationwide trade union federations, which finally formed an umbrella organization in 1898, the Landesorganisation Landseinrichtungen (LO) .
Social democracy came to Sweden in 1881 with the Skåne master tailor August Palm , who presented the social democratic ideas at meetings in Malmö and Stockholm. But it wasn't until 1889 that Sweden's Social Democratic Labor Party was formed, and on May 1, 1890, the first May demonstration was held calling for an eight-hour workday.
Cooperation between the trade union and political labor movements was henceforth very close and the development of the two branches of the Swedish labor movement was by and large the same. They first peaked around 1907 when the union had 186,000 members and the Social Democratic Party 113,000 members.
In 1917 there was a split within the Swedish labor movement. A smaller, more radical part joined communism and formed Sweden's Social Democratic Left Party ( Sverges socialdemokratiska vänsterparti ), which in 1921 became Sweden's Communist Party ( Sverges kommunistiska parti ).
For further history see: