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loans, he encouraged manufacturers to produce more and invest more. It paid to build factories and expand production. In December 1932, unemployment reached its apogee at thirty-one per cent; two years later it was halved, and at the end of the decade it was nine per cent. Exports in 1937 were twenty per cent above those in 1929; the comparable in52 The New Totalitarians crease mbt chapa in the output of wood pulp, foundation of national wealth, was forty-three per cent. Industrial production for 1939 was sixty-five per cent more than in 1929: world trade discount mbt trainers stagnated during the same period. Sweden had done better than most countries in mending her fortunes. By 1 mbt shoes 940, she had not only overcome the Depression but, making up for her late start, had overhauled the rich industrial states of the West. Imposing as the immediate achievements of the 1930s might have been, the real significance of the decade lay in the ideological <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/mbt-shoes-outlet-c-19.html"><strong>mbt shoes sale </strong></a> groundwork for what was to come. The spectre of poverty and fear of unemployment enabled the government so to guide development that the nation worked hard while sacrificing immediate benefits for future prosperity. A mbt stockists planned economy was so obviously successful that, although Socialist policy, it was rapidly accepted by all camps. And therein lies the crucial importance of those years for Sweden. The Swedes were indoctrinated with the ideas of State direction and intervention in the economy. These became part of the national political canon so that when, in later years, more radical measures were introduced, opposition was absent and the controversy known in the West was avoided in Sweden. In all this, there lies a curious parallel with Russia. In both countries, the 1930s saw the establishment of basic industries and the execution of the groundwork for future progress by regimes that, driven by a compulsion to overcome national backwardness, were obsessed by the priority of economic advancement. In each case, the tasks were accomplished, with the obvious difference that whereas the Soviet Union employed despotic rule, the Swedes enjoyed a constitutional form of government. Lenin once said that ‘Electricity plus Bolshevism equals Communism’, mbt sale which was a way of explaining that his aim was to modernize Russia in a hurry, and to use an amalgam of politics and technology to do so. Swedish Social Democrats, Industrial Peace and the Rise of Modern Sweden 53 in a similar way, see their movement as the political arm of the technological revolution, its purpose that of transmitting and distributing to the population the benefits of what scientists and engineers have achieved. To do this properly, the Social Democrats believed in the necessity of a planned economy. But they also understood that, while the planners propose, the producers dispose, so that their schemes would be mbt chapa futile until the economy gave the wherewithal to manipulate. While beginning the erection of the apparatus of central planning, they were also vigorously engaged in breathing new life into Swedish industry. It was one thing to encourage investment and build new factories but, unless the workers agreed to work, plans for expansion were so many empty words. At the end of the 1920s, and the beginning of the 1930s, strikes and lock-outs were ravaging Sweden. Industrial peace was seen to be vital for industrial progress, and it was pursued with the same urgency as the purely technological and economic prescriptions for putting the country on mbt footwear its feet. In May 1931, strikers had been shot dead by the army at Adalen, in northern Sweden. Neither employers nor trade unions had wanted to invoke force, both considering the incident a lamentable failure of the civil authority which they would have preferred to avoid. Troops had been called in by the provincial governor who feared that the police were unable to control militant demonstrations organized by the Communists among the strikers in Adalen. The order to open fire was an understandable reaction to a crowd that was beginning to be aggressive. Since the riot act had been read, the fusillade was indisputably legal, but it was a shocking aberration of national behaviour, the first and last of its kind. Five demonstrators were killed. Their deaths gave a taste of violence that horrified Sweden and aided the peacemakers. The country wanted an end to conflict, and the Social Democratic government was elected in 1932 on a promise of 54 The New Totalitarians peace. If it was to remain in power, it had to redeem its pledge. Industrial peace was entrenched within six years. It was not a radical innovation, but the fulfilment of a long historical process. The Adalen shots obscured the powerful underlying forces of Swedish society that were driving labour and capital into each other’s arms. The trade unions, even if their leaders spoke with the tongue of intransigence and class warfare on ceremonial occasions, saw the futility of mbt strikes. Impelled by the tradition of loyalty and understanding nurtured in the bruks, they sought to negotiate with the employers. And the employers, heirs to the same tradition, shrank in their turn from sustained confrontation. Devotion to corporate thought had ensured <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/mens-6-inch-authentics-premium-classic-boot-black-p-708.html"><strong>timberland mens boots </strong></a> the early birth of collective bargaining. The first Swedish wage agreement was negotiated in 1869, between Stockholm masons and builders, acting as two groups. Individual approaches, each man getting what he could out of his master, had never been popular with either. By the first decade of this century, collective bargaining was a common habit. At the end of the 1920s, it mbt discount had been extended to national agreements for particular industries. But it was not enough. If the miners made peace, but not the dockers, the country was litde better off. The complexity of an industrial nation required conciliation all along the line, and the only way of ensuring it was by centralizing the whole process of wage bargaining. A unified, national system became imperative. The impulse for its establishment came, oddly enough, not from the Social Democrats, but from the last non-Socialist government to hold office. In 1928, the Conservatives passed legislation prohibiting industrial conflicts during the validity of a collective agreement. It was mbt walking shoes a peculiar hybrid of civil and criminal law in which an act was made illegal, but offenders could not be prosecuted. By definition, a strike under these conditions was a misdemeanour, but punishment was Industrial Peace and the Rise of Modern Sweden 55 excluded. It is a concept well embedded in Swedish law. A man may be found guilty but escape penalty. The stigma of conviction is supposed to be its own punishment, but the effect is to condemn <a href="http://www.mytimberlandshoe.com/timberland-8-inch-premium-c-267.html"><strong>timberland boots mens</strong></a> the crime, rather than the criminal. Applied to industrial relations, it discredits unauthorized Cheap mbt shoes action without stigmatizing the participants as criminals, and thereby presenting them with a martyr’s crown. And it is a fact that, today, Swedes have an instinctive horror of wildcat strikes (which are usually termed ‘illegal’), without considering the individual strikers as malefactors. It is a particular application of a Swedish propensity to deny personal responsibility, and to separate the man from his act. The remedy for contravention was established as civil damages for breach of contract. Both strikes and lock-outs are proscribed, with workers and employers allowed impartially to bring a suit mbt clearance . A special industrial court was established to administer the new law. At first the trade unions were infuriated by the legislation, which they inclined to see as a device to shackle themselves. But they were mollified by the discovery that the bosses, whom the new arrangement might be supposed to favour, turned out to sympathize with them. Both sides disliked the prospect of the law’s obtruding itself into their disputes; they both disliked even more the underlying threat of government interference. When the Social Democrats came to office in 1932, mbt shoes online the unions wanted to keep the State out of the labour market with perhaps more urgency mbt discount than under a Conservative regime. Before, it had been a question of repelling the employers, enemies from the outside; now what was at stake was the containment of an internal rival, the party, for the control of the labour movement. The employers were equally anxious to keep the authorities at bay. Self-preservation drove both sides together and, they conscientiously devised a system of central bargaining which enabled them to settle their disagreements privately – or at least be seen to do so. 56 The New Totalitarians Collective bargaining had long been accepted as demonstrably rational and efficient. Unions and employers accepted the principle; what remained was to centralize it, so that the LO and the Employers’ Confederation could negotiate for the whole country. They conferred on and off for five years and, in 1938, codified their ideas in the Saltsjobaden agreement, named after the Stockholm suburb where it was signed. It was the peace treaty between labour and capital. The signatories mbt uk agreed that their interests were the same, and that antagonism would get them nowhere. They committed themselves to the peaceful settlement of industrial disputes. Strikes were outlawed as long as the agreement was in force. The right to strike was not, however, abolished; it was regulated. In order to strike without breach of faith, it was necessary to repudiate the agreement, which required at least a fortnight’s notice. Under the guise of rules of procedure, a cooling-off period had thus been built into the system. Both the unions and the employers were led by men with the tastes of councillors, and an instinct for the conference room. Saltsjobaden was not a cockpit of politicians, agitators and prophets, but a consistory of lawyers and administrators. The agreement bore cheap mbt shoes their stamp. Both sides had agreed to treat its drafting as a matter of defining procedure and organization. Their only problem was to arrive at a mutually acceptable code which would take care of any conceivable dispute, and specify methods of negotiation and arbitration so that strikes and lock-outs would be superfluous. Both unions and employers were preoccupied with methods of settling disputes over the interpretation of texts. A central agreement, specifying wages for a whole country, is of necessity a complex document, and what appears clear and unequivocal at the conference table can turn out to be obscure and ambiguous by the time it is applied to a particular factory. The Saltsjobaden agreement abolished the confusion of Industrial Peace and the Rise of Modern Sweden 57 individual unions and employers negotiating separately and at cross-purposes, substituting the order of two parties facing <a href="http://www.vocinelweb.it/album/displayimage.php?pos=-171"><strong>MBT shoes teach you walk path to health</strong></a> each other across the table; it was the duel instead of the brawl. The LO and the Employers’ Confederation, assuming sovereign power, mbt sale divided Sweden between themselves, and industrial peace was enshrined as a national institution. If central bargaining was to be anything more than empty words, each party had to monopolize the representation of its side of i
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