This is a study of an ethnic hierarchical division of labor on Iföverken in the south of Sweden between 1895-1930. The study aims to see if migrants got different kind of profession at Iföverken and if there were in fact ethnic hierarchical distribution of work. It also aims to see if the pattern of ethnic hierarchical division of labor was different before and after the First World War. Also, the study aims to see in what regard these labor migrants became members of the local union, division 227. By studying if labor migrants got different kind of professions using the concept of class in a structuralist perspective, hierarchical positions become visible. Using moving in and out records that the priests wrote as migrants arrived and member list of the union as the main sources, the study shows that there existed a pattern of ethnic hierarchical division of labor. The results show that migrants from regions with Slavic population got the most unskilled work while migrants from regions with German population made most of the professional and higher valued workforce. There where some migrants that became active members of the union division 227, consequently it can be argued that these migrants where a part of a collective movement and class struggle.

In the 1880s, capitalism as a social and economic system integrated new geographic areas of the American continent. The construction of the Duluth & Iron Range Railroad (D&IR), financed by a group of Philadelphia investors led by Charlemagne Tower and later owned by the US Steel was part of this emerging political economy based on the exploitation of human and material resources. Migrant labor was in demand as it came cheap and, generally, floated between various construction-sites on the “frontier” of capitalism. The Swedish immigrants were one part of this group of “floaters” during the late 1800s and made up a significant part of the force that constructed and worked on the D&IR between the 1880s and the 1920s. This book deals with power relations between groups based on class and ethnic differences by analyzing the relationship between the Anglo-American bourgeois establishment and the Swedish and other immigrant workers and their children on the D&IR and in the railroad town of Two Harbors, Minnesota. The Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony in Minnesota, to a large extent, dictated the conditions under which Swedish immigrants and others toiled and were allowed access to American society. I have therefore analyzed the structural subordination and gradual integration of workers and, in particular, immigrant workers, in an emerging class society. The book also deals with the political and the cultural opposition to Anglo-American bourgeois hegemony that emerged in Two Harbors and that constructed a radical public sphere during the 1910s. In this process, new group identities based on class and ethnicity emerged in the working class neighborhoods in the wake of the capitalist expansion and exploitation, and as a result of worker agency. Building on traditions of political insurgency an alliance of immigrant workers, particularly Swedes, Anglo skilled workers and parts of the local petty bourgeoisie rose to a position of political and cultural power in the local community. This coalition was held together by the language of class that became the basis of a local multi-ethnic working class identity laying claim to its own version of Americanism. The period of preparedness leading up to the Great War, the war itself, and its aftermath, produced a reaction from the Anglo American bourgeoisie which resulted in a profound change in the public sphere as a coalition between “meliorist middle class reformers”, represented primarily by the YMCA and local church leaders and the D&IR and its program of welfare capitalism launched a broad program to counter socialism locally, and to forge new social bonds that would cut across class lines and ethnic boundaries. By this process, the ethnic working class in Two Harbors was offered entry into American society by acquiring citizenship and by their inclusion in a broader civic community undifferentiated by class. But this could only be realized by the workers’ adoption of an Anglo-American national identity based on identification with corporate interests, a new local solidarity that cut across class lines and a white racial identity that diminished the significance of ethnic boundaries. By these means the Swedish immigrants, or at least a portion of them, became Americans on terms established by the D&IR and its class allies.