This Day in Labor History: August 4, 1909

On August 4, 1909, the Swedish General Strike began. Perhaps the largest and most sustained general strike in world history, lasting more than one month, I am surprised it is not more internationally known today. The workers did not win, but that hardly ever gets in the way of which labor history events are remembered.

The Sweden of the early twentieth century was far from the socially liberal and generous near-paradise of today. It was largely a poor country with a lot of farmers trying to hang out against the global forces forcing them off their land. Sweden thus became a major part of the American immigrant story, as these impoverished rural Swedes got to the U.S. and acquired land in Minnesota and the Dakotas to replicate their lifestyles in a new land. A bad winter or a crop failure could lead not just to poverty, but to starvation. Not surprisingly then, the same radical winds that blew over the European working class during these years would also hit Sweden. Socialist ideologies in all their varied forms had a home there, while the conservative elites wanted nothing to change except for an increase in their power. The nation moved toward overt class warfare.

In 1897, the Scandinavian Labor Congress and the Swedish Social Democratic Party, a political party of trade unionists, decided to create a national union umbrella organization. The next year, this formed as the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (Landsorganisationen i Sverige in Swedish). It still exists today. Part of the reason for this was to counteract employer trade associations that functioned as a union of the rich (which let’s face it, is basically what the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers and other such organizations in the U.S. do). In 1902, the Swedish business community founded the Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen (SFA), or Swedish Employers’ Confederation in English. That year, workers engaged in a two-day general strike to expand the suffrage. This emboldened the nation’s labor movement and also made employers determined to resist further changes to their domination over society.

In 1909, with Sweden in a recession, the SFA decided to act together to slash the wages of everyone in the nation’s robust timber and textile industries. The employers also engaged in a series of lockouts in June and July to force workers to accept these new conditions. This led the unions to fight back by going on strike. Soon this spread throughout the nation. Upwards of 300,000 Swedes went on strike on August 4.

The strike was certainly not democratic in nature. The LO called the strike without consulting workers. But out of the 500,000 affected workers, 300,000 honored the strike, which is pretty impressive given the lack of real organizing around it. But there were divisions. The LO, as labor leaders often do, wanted to maintain a level of moderation. It kept the strike’s goals conservative, based strictly around rescinding the wage cuts. But many workers had engaged with radical ideologies, particularly forms of syndicalism, and also saw themselves in a state of permanent warfare with employers. So rather than stop with rescinding the wage cuts, many hoped the strike would force employers to actually raise wages. This wasn’t just a passing desire either. It led to a lot of tension between the local unions and the LO leadership during the strike itself.

Interestingly, the state took a pretty neutral tone during the strike. I cannot but imagine that the political leaders and monarchy of Sweden were on the side of the employers. But in part because the LO maintained order, the state remained at least functionally neutral. Part of this is that a lot of the police supported the strike and it seems that the nation’s leaders didn’t want to test how far the police would go in busting their friends and family, not that this usually stops the cops from doing so. Different country I guess. In any case, the LO also set up groups of workers to prevent violence at the local level. These were to work with the police to maintain order. What the government did do was to end alcohol sales during the strike, which I am sure made some workers very unhappy but which also ensured, at least to some extent, that drunken violence would not result.

But there was no real financial preparation for the strike. Because the LO called the strike without much warning, the unions did not have time to prepare proper strike funds. The LO had done no work centralizing any of this or building its own strike funds. So it just left it all to the local unions. That did not help the tensions between central leadership and the rank and file. What the LO hoped is that the strike would be short and the government would step it to mediate the issue. It tried to appeal to liberal supporters in the government here and as such, excluded any kind of necessary work from the strike, not just water and electricity, but workers who cared for work animals.

Over time though, even though the unions worked relatively effectively together, poverty won out. That’s always the biggest tool employers have–starve the workers into submission. This began to happen in a couple of weeks. Finally, on September 4, the LO called off the strike.

The aftermath of the strike split the Swedish labor movement. About half the unions left and formed the more radical anarcho-syndicalist SAC Syndikalisterna. To make it even worse, employers used the opportunity of the strike to lay off about 20,000 workers, which hurt the unions even more since there just weren’t as many jobs. In the aftermath, emigration increased from Sweden for better opportunities in other nations, including the United States. Moreover, employers kept up their own strike, i.e., they locked out employees to force them to accept employer control. Some of this went on as late as December 1910, which is a heck of a long time for an employer to shut down their business in order to bust the union.

So in the end, the strike was a disaster, but despite some poor decisions made by the unions, I don’t think you can really blame them given the circumstances and the obvious agenda of the employers. It would however take a long time for Swedish unionism to recover.

This is the 530th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.