Scientific Report in IIMS
On 28th October in the International Center for Study of Institutions and Development Ilja Viktorov, PhD, researcher, Department of Economic History, Stockholm University, presented his report entitled «The Swedish employers and the wage-earner funds debate during the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s».
In his work researcher focused on the one of the most controversial political debates in post-war Swedish history centered on a proposal to create ‘wage-earner funds’ (WEF). It supposed a gradual transition of control of capital stock in companies to specially constituted funds owned and controlled by the unions. The main institutional actors of Swedish society, namely the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish Employers’ Confederation were involved in the WEF debate. At the same time, Sweden witnessed a deep recession, break up of established patterns in the labour market and crisis of global Fordism, i.e. the mass production society.
The uniqueness of the submitted report is that the author had an access to SAF’s archives and used data, which were found out there, on the contrary to the researchers who studied the issue in the 1980s and 1990s and did not comprehensively account SAF’s involvement in the WEF debate.