This paper investigates variations of and causes for stability in the Nordic models of multi-employer collective bargaining by studying employer behavior since 1990 in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Conventional accounts have highlighted the significance of strong and encompassing unions for the emergence and persistence of the Nordic bargaining models (e.g. Korpi 2006). Conversely, other scholars have stressed how employers drove greater coordination in the search for greater internal control over labor and product markets (e.g. Due et al. 1994; Swenson 1991). Recently, Martin and Swank (2012) have traced the persistence of macro-coordination to multi-party structures in the early 20th century in which business friendly right-wing political parties were squeezed between class interests of labor and agriculture. This squeeze prompted employers to coordinate in order to counter-weigh labor and agriculture.
This paper complements and qualifies these accounts by tracing employer behavior since 1990 and highlights important conjunctures in which employers in the Nordic countries, mostly unsuccessfully, attempted to pursue strategies of liberalization akin to employers’ strategies in countries, e.g. Germany and Great Britain, where coordinated collective bargaining have eroded. While the relative stability of Nordic collective bargaining can generally be interpreted as a result of path dependency due to e.g. strong unions, skills-provision systems or multi-party structures, detailed process-tracing of reforms reveals a different picture. In line with Thelen (2014) we show that employer demands for liberalization have been partially fulfilled in some instances, while coordination has increased in others. Hereby, we show that the dynamics behind the apparent stability in recent decades are highly complex and rely on coalitions and power struggles between and within the associations of employers, unions and changing governments to restore competitiveness in small-open economies while maintaining solidaristic elements.
The analysis of coalitions and processes moreover underlines the distinctiveness of each Nordic country and their institutional trajectories. In Sweden and Denmark, employers have largely been successful in restoring wage moderation through pattern-bargaining around the manufacturing agreements. Conversely, in Finland and Norway the peak level actors have been key to ensure moderation. All four countries differ in the extent to which they allow company level bargaining on wages and working time and the extent to which they include so called welfare provisions like pension, education and leave arrangements. By employing the most-similar comparative design we are thus able to draw out theoretical implications of our study for the field of industrial relations and comparative political economy.
The article is based on empirical studies carried out in 2013 and 2014 for SAMAK, a joint committee of the Nordic Social Democratic labor movement.