Looking to Sweden in order to Reconstruct Australia

Abstract

The most prominent interest in the ‘Swedish model’ in Australian political history came after a high-level union delegation visit in 1986 produced a major report titled Australia Reconstructed, which had the nominal endorsement of the Labor Government then in office. However, at this very time, the characteristics of the Swedish policy approach which were most admired by the visiting Australian unionists were undergoing important changes, to which they paid little attention but which critics from the Right strongly emphasized in response.

The Australian labour movement interest in Sweden in the 1980s had some distinctive features. It focused on manufacturing industry and skills training policy, reflecting priorities of the main participating unionists. It was also particularly concerned with industrial democracy and work design, as a result of important earlier links between Swedish, Norwegian and Australian industrial relations scholars and practitioners which were forged from the late 1960s. Increased interest in Sweden partly arose from the search for a new political vision by particular elements of the Australian Left following their disillusionment with the Soviet Union after the 1968 Prague Spring.

This article presents the results of interviews with participants and extensive archival research to provide new information and perspective on Scandinavian influences on the Australian labour movement; and the political background of the main people involved.

It also analyzes how discussion of the ‘Swedish model’ receded in Australia following the economic setbacks of the early 1990s amid a perception that ‘the model’ had collapsed, but how policy interest in the continuing evident achievements of Sweden and the other Nordic nations has gradually re-emerged in Australia since then, though in a somewhat different way to before.

Keywords:

• Swedish model
• Australia
• trade unions

Acknowledgements

Thanks to George Koletsis, Dave Oliver, Lars Johansson, Kristian Olsson, staff of the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm and the Noel Butlin Archives Centre in Canberra; all interviewees; Jenny Andersson, Elisabeth Elgán, Geoff Dow, Andrew Vandenberg, Stuart Macintyre, Julius Roe, Iain Campbell and Mary Hilson.

Notes

1 Australian Council of Trade Unions and Trade Development Council, Australia Reconstructed.

2 See ‘Australia Reconstructed: 10 years on’.

3 Scott, ‘Social Democracy in Northern Europe’, 4–8.

4 The LO records were studied in the Labour Movement Archives and Library (Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, hereafter ARAB), and are from Serie-signum E 09 A, International correspondence with Australia for the years 1969 to 1990 (specific volume numbers are given when cited). The Swedish Metal workers' Union records were examined in that Union's own archive (hereafter IF Metall) and come from the ‘Utlandet Diverse’ correspondence files for Australia in an annual series of boxes from 1960. The AMWU records were examined in the Australian National University's Noel Butlin Archives Centre (herafter NBAC), Deposit Z102 (box numbers, and names of specific files therein, are given when cited).

5 See Rowse, Coombs, 87–90, 130, 186.

6 1963 file; IF Metall.

7 Jeans, ‘Swedish Unionists Keen on Learning’.

8 Ibid.

9 Letter from Fred Jeans to Åke Nilsson, 29 October, 1963; IF Metall.

10 Jeans, ‘Swedish Unionists Keen on Learning’.

11 ‘Profile: Fred Jeans’, Newspaper clipping in 1963 file; IF Metall.

12 Ibid.

13 This visitor was Cecil James: Letter of 28 August, 1969; IF Metall.

14 For example by the future Labor Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr: see Scott, ‘Social Democracy in Northern Europe’, 5.

15 Interview with Olle Hammarström, 29 January 2007, Stockholm, Sweden.

16 1974 file; IF Metall.

17 Telephone interview with Bill Ford, 14 December 2007.

18 Cameron, ‘Modern Technology’, 368.

19 Ibid., 370–1.

20 Cameron, ‘Managerial Control’, 9, 11.

21 Cameron, ‘Human Satisfaction’, 4, 5.

22 Ibid., 6.

23 Ibid., 10.

24 Ford interview. See also Guy, A Life on the Left, 273, 307, 360–1.

25 Letters from Australian Embassy in Stockholm n.d. c. April 1974, 31 October 1974 and 12 May 1975 in Vol. 99 and 102, ARAB.

26 Resulting in a book: Gunzburg, Industrial Democracy Approaches in Sweden.

27 Dunstan, Felicia, 227, 230.

28 Materials from June and August 1974; IF Metall.

29 Hammarström and Hammarström, Industrial Democracy in Sweden Part 1 and Part 2; Walpole and Hammarström, Women and Industrial Democracy.

30 Hammarström and Hammarström, Industrial Democracy in Sweden Part 1, 22.

31 Lansbury, Swedish Social Democracy. Information in this paragraph is from an interview with Russell Lansbury, 7 December 2007, Sydney, Australia.

32 Wood, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference.

33 See Ibid., 653–7.

34 Dunstan, ‘Opening Address’, in Wood, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference, 4.

35 Ibid., 15, 19.

36 In Wood, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference, 21.

37 Letter from Tony Short to Swedish Trade Union Confederation Secretary, 18 October 1976; Vol. 105, ARAB.

38 Birgitta Åkerstedt referred Short to the Swedish Institute to organize his visit including LO: Ibid.

39 Wood, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference, 334.

40 See Ruskin, ‘Union Policy on Industrial Democracy’, 180, 182.

41 Wood, ed., Proceedings of the International Conference, 256–61.

42 Discussed in Ruskin, ‘Union Policy on Industrial Democracy’, 176–91.

43 NBAC, Box 268 (‘Industrial Democracy 1950–1980’).

44 Amalgamated Metal Unions, Monthly Journal, April 1973, 11–13.

45 Letter of 3 February 1976 from Gerry Phelan to Jan Ollson, Swedish Metal workers' Union; IF Metall.

46 Hammarström interview; Letter of 19 January 1977 from Max Ogden to Jan Olsson; IF Metall.

47 1977 file; IF Metall.

48 Interview with Max Ogden, 10 August 2006, Melbourne, Australia.

49 Ogden, ‘A Strategy Starting in the Workplace’, 26; Ogden, ‘The Workplace as a Learning Centre’, 22.

50 Higgins, ‘Working Class Mobilization’.

51 1982 file; IF Metall.

52 Ogden, ‘Union Study Circles’.

53 Vol. 122, ARAB.

54 Interview with Winton Higgins, 7 December 2007, Sydney, Australia.

55 Higgins, ‘Working-Class Mobilization’, 5.

56 Ibid., 17.

57 Higgins and Apple, ‘How Limited Is Reformism?’.

58 Ibid., 621, 622.

59 Crough and Wheelwright, Australia: A Client State, 210.

60 Interview with Laurie Carmichael, 11 February 2006, Tewantin, Australia.

61 Scott, Running on Empty, 232, 75.

62 Carmichael interview.

63 Higgins, ‘Political Unionism and the Corporatist Thesis’.

64 Ibid., 355, 356–7, 354, 359, 360–1, 367, 369, 363.

65 NBAC, Box 542 (‘Education 1976–1980’).

66 Letter formally signed by Greg Harrison Assistant National Secretary, to State Secretaries, 7 June 1985: NBAC, Box 650 (‘Education Committee 1984–1986’).

67 Document titled ‘AMWU National Education Programme’, NBAC, Box 650.

68 Telex of 28 March 1985 from Leif Blomberg, President, Swedish Metal workers' Union to R.T. Scott, AMWU National President: NBAC, Box 562 (‘International … Sweden 1975–1986’).

69 Letter of 30 May 1985 from R.T. Scott to L. Blomberg, in ibid.

70 Ibid. This file also includes pamphlets on The Swedish Act on Co-Determination at Work issued by the Ministry of Labour in January 1985 and English-language brochures on the LO and the Swedish Metal workers' Union.

71 ‘Accord is Essential’, The Metal Worker, November 1985.

72 1985 file; IF Metall.

73 Letter from Laurie Carmichael, AMWU National Research Officer, to Håkan Arnelid, 9 December 1985, in ibid.

74 Laurie Carmichael, National Research Officer, AMWU, ‘Report to ACTU Officers’, n.d. c. late 1985/early 1986: NBAC, Box 555 (‘Industrial Democracy 1985–1986’). Emphasis in original.

75 The Metal Worker 7, no. 4, May 1986.

76 Stilwell, The Accord – and Beyond, 28.

77 Hammarström interview.

78 ‘European Example is Path to Follow, says Carmichael’, The Metal Worker, November 1986.

79 ‘Carmichael's Swedish Message to unions', Australian Financial Review, 6 October 1986.

80 NBAC, Box 669 (‘AMWU Education Committee Minutes 1986–1987’).

81 ‘European Example is Path to Follow’.

82 Interview with Ted Wilshire, 10 February 2006, Brisbane, Australia.

83 Ibid.

84 The letters and responses are in Vol. 125, ARAB.

85 Wilshire interview.

86 Ibid.

87 Higgins interview.

88 Ford interview. Ford, Gunzburg and Lansbury also worked on another Industrial Democracy paper for the Hawke Government at that time: see Department of Employment and Industrial Relations, 1986.

89 See Scott, ‘Social Democracy in Northern Europe’, 3–4.

90 Viveca Denholm, Letter to the Editor, The Age, Melbourne, 10 August 1987.

91 Ewer et al., Politics and the Accord, 111–7 and passim.

92 See for example Higgins, ‘Missing the Boat: Labor and Industry in the Eighties’.

93 Higgins interview.

94 Including Hammarström and Hammarström, Progress or Decline?, 1991.

95 See Bamber, Lansbury and Wailes eds., International and Comparative Employment Relations, including the editors’ ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ and Olle Hammarström et al., Chapter 9, ‘Employment Relations in Sweden’. Olle Hammarström, following his wife Ruth's tragic death in the Estonia ferry sinking in 1994, left SIF to work as a private consultant for trade unions, which he still does today.

96 Lansbury and Wailes, ‘The Meaning of Industrial Democracy in an Era of Neo-Liberalism’.

97 See Scott, ‘Social Democracy in Northern Europe’, 9–10.

98 See Business Council of Australia, New Pathways to Prosperity.