The choreography of a strike
The farm workers’ conflict in Södra Möre 1929–1931
The article deals with the last important strike among farm workers in Sweden. It started in the summer of 1929 on some twenty estates or large farms in Södra Möre, south-eastern Småland. It did not end until 1931. As an occupational group the farm workers were organized late in Sweden. The labour disputes on estates during the first three decades of the twentieth century were usually caused by the farmers’ unwillingness to come to an agreement with the unions. Many farmers wanted to retain an old system with personal agreements without the intervention of unions. The dispute in Södra Möre was the last great manifestation of resistance among owners of large farms to the development towards collective agreements on the labour market.
Much public attention was drawn to these labour disputes on large farms. One reason was that the farm workers were looked upon as a particularly poor and vulnerable group in a rural society that was not yet reached by the blessings of modernity. Another reason was that farm strikes aroused strong feelings, since they hit the care of animals and the national food supply. The farmers often ordered the eviction of the striking workers, since the lodgings were a part of the payment. The evictions were seen by outsiders as very provocative. A farm workers’ strike was, perhaps more than other strikes, a battle for public opinion. Information about the strike was spread through media and it was tempting for the two sides to manipulate this information. That makes farm workers’ strikes a very interesting subject of study.
The Södra Möre strike included spectacular evictions and a very long boycott of the farms. This boycott caused the farmers far more problems than the strike itself, as they had no difficulties in getting strikebreakers.
One interesting feature of this strike is the anonymous strike songs that were spread in Södra Möre. These are the subject of one of the short stories in the collection Statare, published in 1937 by Ivar Lo-Johansson (1901– 1990), a leading Swedish author, himself the son of a farm worker and a lifelong spokesman of this occupational group. In the article his interpretation of the songs and the strike is compared with historical facts. The rhetoric of the strike is discussed, particularly an attack on a preacher who owned one of the farms, an attack with clear antireligious elements.
Both sides used historical arguments in this dispute. The union suggested that the poor labourers were descendants of once free peasants who had lost their farms as a result of the Swedish aquavit policy in earlier centuries. The farmers stressed their own heritage from free farmers who never submitted to state government and economic straitjackets. They pointed out the history of Södra Möre as a bold and independent county, guarding the border with Denmark.
The labour dispute in Södra More was a clash between different worlds. Against the old farming society with its patriarchal structure, marked by personal agreements between the farmer and his workers, stood the new industrial society with its labour movement, collectively organized and centrally controlled, struggling for standardized working conditions. The farmers were able to delay this development, but nothing more.
