A new collective agreement concluded on 22 September 1997 will change the principles for workers' participation in the Swedish state sector. It has very few binding provisions and is presumed to further the transition from a "bargaining culture" to a culture of "cooperation".
The Swedish legislation on workers' participation is based on collective bargaining, and not on consultation or cooperation. Consequently, it also presupposes that workers exercise their rights through their trade unions. There are no parallel institutions representing employees, such as the Betriebsratin Germany or the comité d'entreprisein France.
Before employers decide on important changes in the enterprise they are obliged, according to the Act on Joint Regulation of Working Life, otherwise known as the Codetermination Act (Medbestämmandelagen, MBL), to negotiate on their own initiative with the company-level trade union branch. This obligation is far-reaching, covering matters such as the appointment of a new manager, the fixing of the next year's budget or the closure of the whole company. Should the trade union so request, the employer is also bound to bargain on any other matter that concerns the relation between the company and its employees.
The negotiations can result in legally-binding collective agreements, but if the employer does not agree with the trade union, then management is free to decide for itself. However, the decision must not be taken before the negotiations have been brought to an end, otherwise the employer will be liable to pay damages. This is the trade union's means of bringing pressure on the employer, which may be prepared to compromise in order to gain time.
Employers have criticised these provisions for creating bureaucratic obstacles to the running of their activities. However, during the 30 years that the Act has existed most employers and trade unions have worked out more flexible forms for workers' participation, reducing the number of formal negotiations. Thus, criticism against the MBL has gradually waned.
The central collective agreement for the state sector has up to now been much stricter than agreements in other sectors. It regulated in detail how employers and trade union branches in individual authorities could organise workers' participation and on what subjects they were allowed to make local collective agreements. On 22 September 1997, however, a new central agreement with a totally different approach was concluded by the National Agency for Government Employers (Arbetsgivarverket), the Union of Service and Communication (SEKO), a negotiating cartel of unions affiliated to the Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations (SACO-S) and the Negotiating Council for Public Employees (TCO-OF).
The title of the new agreement is Cooperation for development. Its signatories expect it to further the transition from a "bargaining culture" to a culture of "cooperation", more in the spirit of the Work Environment Act (Arbetsmiljölagen) than of the MBL - which means that "codetermination" to a large extent would be integrated in the employer's own decision-making process. More than two-thirds of the accord's contents are non-binding, general declarations concerning the objectives of the agreement and the direction of the cooperation between the employers and their workers.
The agreement states that employers and employees have a common interest in public authorities carrying out their activities as effectively as possible. This implies that the employer, the workers and the trade unions are all involved and committed in the development of the activities of the public authority concerned. An atmosphere of trust and cooperation between all concerned is therefore taken for granted. A prerequisite for success is that all employees have influence over their own work, and that their competence is utilised and developed within a safe and satisfying working environment. The objective of the agreement is to elicit the support of employers and trade unions at workplaces to develop a spirit of cooperation. It gives examples of how this cooperation could be organised, but the local parties are free to arrive at their own solutions.
The signatories to the state sector central agreement have also drawn up guidelines as to how the objectives of the agreement should be achieved. The following are some examples.
The few binding provisions include stipulations that the employers and their employees shall have access to consultant experts in medicine, ergonomics, technology and behavioural science in the handling of work environment matters. Furthermore, the trade unions have the right to engage a workers' consultant when the employer contemplates any major change or any major rationalisation of the enterprise which affects employees.
The agreement also states that it is not applicable to the handling of government business, and that local collective agreements must not infringe on political democracy or include forms of cooperation that restrict the decision-making powers of the authority. Such agreements would be null and void.
The new agreement on cooperation in the state sector is an expression of a recent strong trend towards decentralisation in Swedish industrial relations, where the central organisations entrust more decision-making to the parties at company level.
According to Jan Wallenberg at theNational Institute for Working Life, who has been an observer in the negotiations in the state sector, the strongest promoters of the new agreement were neither the employers, nor the local trade union representatives but central trade union officers. They see it as a chance to regenerate local trade union activity, rather than a centrally imposed agreement which is remote from workplace issues. Mr Wallenberg, who has also studied a similar situation in the municipal sector, predicts that the implementation of the agreement will take a long time and meet with considerable difficulties. In the long run however, it might lead to a regeneration of union activity. (Kerstin Ahlberg, NIWL)