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labour contracts and trade (collective) agreements. 659
About twenty national collective agreements (riksavtal) embracing all the
employers and workmen belonging to the contracting unions throughout the
whole of Sweden, were in force at the close of 1912. The period for which the
collective agreements run varies in Sweden between a few months and (in a
few isolated cases) six years; but in recent years the period has tended to be
prolonged, just as the number of workmen affected by long agreements tends
relatively to increase.
Collective agreements have obviously made for peace in the labour
world in Sweden as well as other countries, even if from another point of
view there appears to be a certain lack of proportion between the
comparatively large number of agreements and the comparatively large number of
strikes and lock-outs in spite of those agreements. What the collective
agreements have affected in this regard, they have affected by regulating those
very conditions round which most labour conflicts revolve, namely the
hours of labour and wages. When collective bargaining was first
introduced into Sweden, it unquestionably aimed at something more, namely
the totals exclusion of strikes and lock-outs during the term agreed
upon. But when the workmen commenced to establish sympathetic
strikes, and the employers in their turn resorted to lock-outs as
a weapon of defence, people in general, and the big unions in
particular, began to lose faith in the efficacy of collective bargaining
as a means of averting strife. All that is attemped nowadays
is to formulate the agreement in such a manner as to obviate strikes
intended to compel the other side to accept new terms as to matters already
regulated in the agreement, or conditions running counter to the provisions
of the agreement. On the other hand, if a strike is made in order to gain
some object’ falling outside the scope of the agreement, the general
opinion nowadays, an opinion which is sometimes expressly announced in the
agreement, is that the strike in this case does not constitute an actual
breach of the agreement. Therefore, where there is an express intention
of averting strife, the plan adopted is to insert in the agreement special
regulations providing for measures to be adopted in case of conflict, or
containing prohibitions against strikes and lock-outs arising from certain
specified causes, or occasionally categorical prohibitions against strikes
arising from any cause whatsoever. However, these kind of special
regulations do not necessarily form an integral part of collective agreements.
The nucleus of collective agreements is the scale of wages, and round that
nucleus are clustered general principles relating to conciliation and
arbitration, the apprentice system, the free right of workmen to combine in
unions, the supervision of labour, the position of foremen in relation to
the union, and so forth. These general principles are thus so intimately
bound up with the scale of wages that they have effect only as long as
the scale of wages is in force, and cease to have effect when the scale of
wages ceases to be in force. However, in recent times endeavours have
been made to free these general principles from their dependence on the
scale of wages by lifting them bodily up into a kind of superior collective
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