International and Comparative Business by McCann Leo;

Author:McCann, Leo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4714146
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2014-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

Exhibit 7.1 A ‘flight from work’ in Sweden? Disaffection and alienation at Ericsson in the 1970s

Work dissatisfaction became a widespread phenomenon across the advanced societies since at least the 1960s. Although the piece below by Gö;ran Palm was written in Sweden in the 1970s, it could just as easily describe almost any contemporary workplace in the advanced economies, suggesting that the Swedish model was not as employee-friendly as you might think, and that issues of work overload and work dissatisfaction go back a long way. Here Palm reports the viewpoints of Roland, an experienced metalworker at Ericsson:

‘There’s a poorer spirit of solidarity. Definitely poorer. Everyone is rushing off to look after his own interests. Formerly union meetings were fairly well-frequented, most people lived near their work places. If a boat excursion was arranged for union members in the summer, you could count on six or seven hundred participants. That sort of thing is impossible today.. […]’

‘Prices and rents and taxes have run far ahead of the agreement wages. As a result, there have been real wage reductions. The workers are forced to find solutions of their own and that means increased pressure in piece-work jobs without regard for consequences. […] At the same time, the work takes all his energy so that he simply can’t manage union activities during his leisure time. Formerly there were plenty of fine jobs which could engage one’s interest because of their versatility and if your interest is engaged, you have energy for other things as well. But many of those jobs have been broken down into small piece-rate jobs nowadays. Pull a lever, fasten some screws, it makes for a deadly monotony. If you add this to the piece-work stress, you have the explanation why many workers can’t stand the strain purely physically. And when that happens, there’s no energy left for solidarity.’

[…]

‘Only if today’s industries are compared with the poverty, dirt and boss rule of the pre-war period can one claim that the workers’ conditions are better today. If instead, one compares conditions with the 1940s and the early 1950s one cannot possibly claim that the workers have essentially better conditions. Today’s industrial workers have to stand worse knocks than they did 20 or 30 years ago, that is the bleak truth of the matter.’

(Palm 1977: 61-2, 74)

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