One of the most controversial debates in contemporary Swedish history centred on a proposal to create “wage-earner” funds. The main institutional actors of Swedish society were involved in this debate during the 1970s and 1980s. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how the most important institutional actors in Sweden, namely LO, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish Employer Confederation (SAF), participated in and defined themselves in the wage-earner funds debate, against the background of the crisis of the Swedish Fordism, i.e. the mass production society. Chapter 2 consists of an analysis of those inherent features of Swedish Fordism that potentially could imply dissolution of the Fordist society in Sweden after the 1960s. Chapter 3 investigates debates about wage solidarity policy and the concentration of power and ownership in the Swedish economy that resulted in the LO wage-earner funds proposal from 1975. Chapter 4 discusses the opinions of active members in LO regarding the wage-earner funds proposals from 1975 and 1978. Chapter 5 investigates the Social Democratic Party's relationship to wage-earner funds. The chapter surmises that SAP leaders took a pragmatic attitude towards funds. This pragmatism differed from the opinion expressed by the radical activists in the party. Chapter 6 deals with the reaction of the Swedish Employer Confederation to the wage-earner funds proposal. The SAF anti-fund campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s are investigated in detail in the context of a neoliberal ideological offensive in Sweden. The chapter argues that the decision to abandon the centralized wage bargaining model influenced SAF's strategy in the debate over wage-earner funds. The dissertation’s main conclusion is that the radical wings of LO and SAP as well as the SAP leaders and the Swedish employers all used the mobilization around wage-earner funds for their own political purposes to solve problems resulting from the crisis of Swedish Fordism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-1362 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Viktorov, Ilja |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen, Stockholm |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Stockholm studies in economic history, 0346-8305 ; 51 |
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