Lockouts in Scandinavia, c. 1900–1938

Abstract

Statistics on labour conflicts in Denmark, Norway and Sweden before WWII show the quantitative importance of lockouts. For instance, in 1920’s Denmark 65 per cent of all workers involved in conflicts were locked out. The mass sympathy lockout was introduced in Denmark in 1899 and became an inspiration to Scandinavian employers for decades. In the early stage the lockout was used to secure managerial control, later it was primarily employed to cut wages during recessions. A quantitative comparison with the Netherlands indicates that Scandinavia indeed was a lockout region. The ratio of locked out workers in Denmark to the Netherlands was 6:1. In order to understand how lockouts came to play such a prominent role, Scandinavia is contrasted with the USA—a country where employers chose a radically different way to combat unions and strikes.

Appendix: Norwegian Conflict Statistics

To make Norway comparable to Denmark and Sweden, I have been forced to manipulate the statistics. Statistics Norway did not distinguish between strikes and lockouts, except for the period 1922–1925. But AFL did. When the union confederation in 1909 hired a new secretary in charge of the statistical gathering, the foundation was laid for a comprehensive labor conflict statistics.⁵⁰ From that year on, every booklet offered summary tables on strikes and lockouts on frequency, involvement and volume, and individual conflict reports with information on branch, character, duration, workers involved, whether the parties were organized or not, the immediate reason for—as well the result of—the conflict, etc. Importantly, the AFL method of collecting conflicts was the same until 1938, the last pre-war year for which the confederation produced statistics. Therefore, I use the AFL time series on strikes and lockouts, 1909–1938.

As pointed out by Flemming Mikkelsen, the year-by-year correlation is high between AFL’s and Statistics Norway’s figures on total conflict involvement (r = 0.98). Nonetheless, Statistics Norway systematically gave higher figures than AFL. One reason is that AFL focused on unionized workers, whereas Statistics Norway registered more non-unionized workers.

My solution is to use the proportions of strikes and lockouts as given by AFL and scale them up according to Statistics Norway’s conflict figures. Apart from the fact that there is reason to believe that the aggregated figures of Statistics Norway are better than AFL’s, the method has the advantage of adding knowledge to existing one. My estimated figures on strikes and lockouts are compatible with conflict data already used by other researchers.

Imagine that total involvement in year X is 10,000 according to Statistics Norway and 8,000 according to AFL; that is, Statistics Norway reports 25% higher involvement. Equivalently, 10,000 divided by 8,000 equals 1.25. Further, assume that AFL reports 5,000 strikers and 3,000 locked out workers. These figures are then multiplied by the quotient, 1.25, yielding new, scaled-up values of 6,250 and 3,750, respectively—the sum of which equals 10,000. The steps are repeated for each year (each year has its own quotient).

The Norwegian official statistics before 1922 are of poorer quality than 1922 onwards.⁵¹ The pre-1922 data are definitely good enough to detect trends in involvement. Further analysis is needed to determine whether the data also allow comparisons in levels. A pragmatic—if not very principled—argument for comparing in levels also prior to 1922, is that other scholars have done so before.⁵²