“Every person is, of course, free to break the strike.” These words from IF Metall’s assistant collective bargaining secretary, Simon Petersson, ten months into the strike for a collective bargaining agreement at Tesla (Arbetet, Aug. 20, 2024), perhaps best illustrate the union’s defeat. The fight against strike-breaking has been an absolute necessity for the labor movement internationally ever since the rise of industrialism and wage labor. This is especially true in Sweden, where strike-breaking has had a history that is bloody, to say the least—from the major strikes of the late 19th century to the shootings in Ådalen in 1931 and the years that followed into the 1930s. Historian Håkan Blomqvist provides an overview of the struggle against strike-breaking in Sweden.

Image: A strike-breaker is hoisted out of the cargo hold of the steamship Milos during the strike in Ådalen in 1931.

Violence, threats, tribunals, blacklists, and social ostracism. Police, military, prison, and blacklisting. This is how the battles over strike-breaking could be characterized in the Swedish context since the emergence of labor unions in the late 1870s. Preventing “willing workers” from sabotaging a collectively decided work stoppage was seen as a legitimate defense against outright betrayal of the community. And against the struggle to put food on the table. Physical violence to prevent “strike breakers” from taking blocked jobs was common during the major “organizational struggles” for the right to unionize and collective bargaining from the 1880s to the late 1930s.

As the labor press emerged toward the end of the 19th century, young labor organizations began publishing not only strike announcements but also lists of “strike breakers” involved in various conflicts, complete with names and home addresses. The aim was to shame the strike breaker and exclude them from the class community. “Meet him with contempt,” was a common call to action in the advertisements. In addition to this, there were not only physical attempts to block access to the workplace.

The names and addresses of strike breakers were published in the labor press to exclude them from the class community. Long afterward, former strike breakers could ask for forgiveness in order to be readmitted into the social community, as in this case, nearly ten years after a telephone operators’ strike in Stockholm.

In the journal *Arbetarhistoria* (2020:3–4), historian Martin Ericsson has studied various “repertoires of conflict” in the struggle against strike-breaking at different workplaces in the 1920s and 1930s.

These include violent incidents such as when syndicalists in 1923 threw an explosive charge at strike breakers during a log-floating conflict in Västerbotten, and how an iron pipe filled with dynamite was thrown at a dance for strike breakers in 1928 during a farm laborers’ conflict in Degerfors. But it also covers many other forms of what Ericsson calls “collective violence,” most often in the form of harassment. This could involve “roundups” and “trials,” where strikebreakers were forced to answer for their crimes against solidarity before assembled families of strikers and the local population. Or “protests” and classic demonstrations at workplaces and homes, where “strike breakers” were showered with insults and, in winter, with snowballs—or met with an icy, threatening silence.

Ericsson pays particular attention to the “home escorts” he calls “well-behaved violence,” which enjoyed support throughout the labor movement, including among the Social Democrats. Strike breakers were then followed from the workplace all the way home by, at times, hundreds of strikers. The level of violence could range from trampling on shoes to kicks to the shins. Ericsson provides several examples from local strikes, concluding: “The extreme intrusiveness during these ‘home escorts’ must in itself have been perceived as threatening.” Another such example comes from the strike at Svenska Kapsylfabriken in Stockholm in the 1920s, when striking women followed strikebreakers home to their apartments and smeared the foul-smelling substance carbon tetrachloride on their doorknobs so that everyone in town would smell the stench of a strikebreaker. The fact that the substance was also carcinogenic likely did not concern the strikers much—if they even knew about it—since they were fighting precisely against the toxic working conditions in bottle cap manufacturing.

Companies and authorities did their utmost to quell resistance to strike-breaking. Starting around the turn of the last century, organizations promoting “freedom of labor” and outright strike-breaking firms emerged, offering “workers willing to work” wherever strikes had broken out. Where strike breakers were recruited from other parts of the country or from abroad, confrontations often turned violent as local workers were pitted against “outsiders.”

During the so-called “Galician battles” in Skåne’s agricultural sector in the early years of the 20th century, military cavalry was deployed to protect the low-paid Russian-speaking workers recruited by the “sugar beet kings” against the harvest strikes organized by the emerging farmworkers’ union. During a dockworkers’ strike in 1908, the well-known Amalthea incident took place when a strike-breaking ship was blown up in the port of Malmö; one strike-breaker was killed and just over twenty were injured. The fact that the strikebreakers were Englishmen was met with revulsion toward “foreign scum” and “rabble”—while the impoverished and powerless Galicians were described as the “lowest form of cheap labor.”

In 1899, the so-called “Åkarp Act” was enacted, making it illegal to force—or even attempt to persuade—anyone to go on strike. During the early years of the 20th century, several dozen workers were convicted annually of violating the Åkarp Act—but the struggle against strike-breaking continued.

For future generations, of course, the shootings in Ådalen in 1931 represent the most famous struggle against strike-breaking and the authorities’ reprisals. During the Depression, wages were slashed on an ongoing basis, which was met with strikes, such as at the Marmaverkens sulfate factory in Hälsingland. Sympathy blockades followed to prevent the shipment of paper pulp from Ådalen. The company, Graningeverken, hired professional strike breakers, who were met with protests and the “rounding up” of some individuals who were “brought to justice” on a gravel pile in Kramfors. It was the very next day that the peaceful protest march against the strike breakers in Lundes Harbor was mowed down by the military.

The shots fired in Ådalen, however, were not the last. During the long pulp conflict the following year, striking workers were shot at by police as they tried to stop strikebreakers in Sandarne and Klemänsnäs; no one was killed, but several were wounded, including by shots to the back.

The struggle against strike-breaking was thus often a bloody affair in which armed strikebreakers from outright fascist organizations and companies, together with the military and police, were deployed to break strikes.

With the labor movement’s breakthrough in the 1930s, the Åkarp Act was repealed in 1938, and in the so-called Saltsjöbaden Agreement, the employers’ association committed itself—in the spirit of the much-vaunted consensus and industrial peace—not to hire strikebreakers during labor disputes.

However, Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary does not belong to any of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise’s industry organizations and, like so many companies in the early 1900s, was able to import strike breakers from abroad—not least through the EU’s Posting of Workers Directive, which allows companies to transfer employees across borders. Furthermore, the fact that the employment agency referred unemployed people to Tesla is misleading, much like the so-called Stripa conflict of 1925–27, when syndicalist miners were forced to face strike breakers who had been ordered to perform work at a picket line so as not to lose their unemployment benefits.

“We forgot our baseball caps,” was one metalworker’s reaction when the defeat of the Tesla strike was up for discussion.

The fact that it does not say “every person is free to break the strike” should be one of the central lessons—not just from the three-year strike at Tesla, but from the entire history of the labor movement.