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Book Review
| Annette Thörnquist (ed.), Work Life, Work Environment and Work Safety in Transition: Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Development in Sweden during the 20th Century, Arbetsliv I Omvandling (Work Life in Transition) no. 9, National Institute for Working Life, Stockholm, 2001. pp. 249. 250 SEK cloth.
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| This interesting collection of nine articles on Swedish working life in the twentieth century focuses on issues of health and safety, and the more amorphous concept of 'work environment'. It provides an excellent introduction both to the particularities of the Swedish experience and to its commonalities with other industrial societies. Publication in English aims to make Swedish research more internationally accessible. I applaud the endeavour and recommend the collection. |
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The collection spans a range of industrial work and workers: work in the iron and steel industry, in forestry and healthcare; women's and men's work; and work opportunities for people with disabilities. Articles explore the role of state inspectorates, specifically the forest inspectorate and the female factory inspectorate. Literary texts are utilised in one article to illuminate the conditions of industrial life. The final articles carry the story through to the present and reflect on trends for the future. Considered as a collection, the articles present a vivid picture of the trajectory of Swedish work relations across the twentieth century: the growth of cooperation between management, labour and the state early in the century; the emergence of the centralised and cooperative Swedish Model of regulation by the late 1930s; its ascendancy across the period of Sweden's greatest industrialisation; and the move to deregulated decentralisation from the 1970s. Gains and losses among different groups of workers from this century of change are effectively portrayed. |
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The articles all reflect variously on the Swedish Model and the extent to which it created healthy and happy workplaces in 'the golden years'. Bill Sund sounds an initial warning note. He examines the condemnation of industrial working conditions by mid-century proletarian novelists and other writers who pictured 'soulless and degrading' work and 'oppressed and unhappy' workers. While an unfamiliarity with this literature limits access to the argument, nevertheless Sund makes it clear that, for these left writers at least, the Swedish Model was a fraud. It did not 'make the world a better place for the citizens'. |
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Two articles on Sweden's significant iron and steel industry also point to the Model's limited success. Maths Isacson's overview of the industry shows that changes in technologies and work organisation continued to produce dangerous and unhealthy workplaces. He makes effective use of a bevy of sources, including oral histories, to argue that, while health and safety have improved in the industry, conditions for most of the century were poor indeed and that solutions have continued to be sought reactively only after new risks have produced new crops of injuries and diseases. Annette Th rnquist's history of silicosis in the same industry complements Isacson's article. Familiar themes in the modern history of occupational disease emerge: neglect of occupational disease in favour of attention to industrial injuries; a focus on workers' susceptibilities and behaviours rather than on the state of the work environment; and an eventual decline in disease incidence which correlates as much with structural changes in the industry as with improvements in the environment of existing workplaces. |
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Three strong articles examine gender relations of work. The most surprising and also the most powerful illumination of the workings of the Swedish Model can be found in Bo Persson's account of the Forest Labour Inspectorate's scheme to promote male forest workers' health and safety by orchestrating the appointment of female cooks for workers' forest cabins. Rather than attending to their own housekeeping needs individually and miserably, forest workers were assisted to cooperate to hire female housekeepers who would create warm, clean cabins and warm, nutritious food. Benefiting physically and psychologically, forest workers would work more safely and happily. It was a piece of social engineering which, Persson argues, certainly improved the quality of cabin life. In the process, it changed forestry's gender order by creating the paid professional role of female housekeeper thereby shaping a new domesticated, clean and orderly, male forest worker. Persson is much less sure that it had any impact on the rate of work injuries. An extraordinary example of the workings of the Model! |
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That the Model contained a powerful ideology of 'protection' for female workers is less surprising and Lynn Karlsson's survey of the subordination of female workers through 'protective' labour regulation sounds a familiar note. In Sweden a prohibition on women's night work in industry, stretching from 1911 to 1962, enforced working women's special, subjugated place. Women within the trade union movement seem to have been almost completely silent on the issue; it would be useful to understand more of the structures and processes that produced this silence. Hypocrisy was evident at numerous points, not least in the fact that the prohibition did not cover women's substantial and economically vital night work in healthcare, hospitality and domestic service. Karlsson concludes that, while the night work prohibition has long gone, gender-specific regulation has not entirely disappeared and that such gendered thinking still threatens women's and men's workplace health and equality. Annika kerblom writes on another familiar component of working women's industrial 'protection': the female factory inspectorate. She argues that the separate inspectorate confirmed women workers' segregation and subordination; much of its work involving the policing of 'protective' legislation. But it also worked for women's rights against their subordination. The female inspectorate was a paradoxical institution. |
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Martha Blomqvist's article on employment among people with disabilities across the century shows the Swedish Model again at work. As minimum wages were enforced and labour processes speeded up at the beginning of the century such workers faced increasing exclusion from work until state assistance helped open employment opportunities again. While these subsidies continue to the present, an increasingly pressured and deregulated labour market threatens new exclusions. Studies such as Blomqvist's of workers judged occupationally handicapped add an important new dimension to work history. |
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That the current work environment continues to threaten workers' health and happiness is a major theme of this publication and is brought into sharp focus in Gerd Lindgren's article. Lindgren argues that present day workers in healthcare (specifically, assistant nurses) face increasing isolation and loneliness because work organisation with its new emphasis on individualised work has eliminated their workgroup cultures and supports. The work situation therefore makes them vulnerable to stress and burn out. Thus threats to workers' health and safety have not gone away; they have only changed in character. The articles in this collection combine to picture a process of continuing transition in working life, occupational health and safety, and work environments. These transitions across the twentieth century have resulted in various gains and losses for different groups of workers; what has remained constant has been the reactive rather than proactive response to the emerging risks and the new injuries and diseases. It is a stimulating argument in a publication well worth reading. |
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| Murdoch University |
LENORE LAYMAN | |
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