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v. social movements.
Sweden was of a somewhat prior date: it was entered into in 1871, when
a general scale of wages in the Stockholm printing trade was fixed after
negotiations between the Compositors’ Union and the Employers’ Guild.
Although the actual term had not yet come into use, there cannot be the
slightest doubt that the agreement then concluded was in point of fact a
collective bargain, nor that it was the outcome of those social and economic
forces which can always be discerned at work behind these agreements.
When the right of the workmen to organize themselves into unions was
gradually recognized by the employers, collective bargaining became a
comparatively common thing in Swedish industry, especially after the employers
in their turn had begun to combine in unions of their own. Collective
agreements reached their culmination, in point of frequency, at the ingress
of the year 1909, when the entire number of these agreements amounted
to considerably over 2 000, and the number of workmen affected by them
to over 300 000; these figures, in the official statistics, include not merely
the workmen directly engaged in these agreements, but all those whose
conditions of employment may be deemed to have been actually, though
only indirectly, regulated by the agreements. After the general lock-out
and the General Strike, of 1909 the number of collective agreements
diminished rapidly.
However, the number of collective agreements in force on the 1st January
1912 was 1 476, and the number of workmen affected by them 229 792. The
entire number of wage-workers employed in industry, trade, and transport was
at that time about 550 000. However, collective agreements have also been
adopted in other occupations than those just mentioned. The subjoined Table
shows the number of collective agreements in existence at the period stated.
Number of Trade (collective) Agreements and of Employers and Workmen
affected by them, on the 1st January 1912.
Occupations Collective Agreements Employers Workmen
Industry (in a wide sense)..... 1 243 7 519 196 431
Agriculture and Gardening..........12 46 816
Forestry............................8 6 1385
Trade and Warehouses..............23 238 1392
Transport by Land..................154 402 21683
Transport by Sea.........■ 7 301 1997
Public Works................29_35__6 088
Total 1476 8 547 229 792
During the year 1911 219 collective agreements were concluded in all, of
which about 49 % had unions as contracting parties on both sides, about 48 % only
on the side of the workmen, and 3 % on neither side, which latter case shows
that even combinations of a more occasional nature are capable of concluding
collective agreements. As regards their scope, the majority of the collective
agreements are confined to a single establishment or factory. But where both
the contracting parties have been unions, the local scope of the agreement
has tended to expand into National collective agreements (besides intermediate
forms).
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