Non-permanent workers

While figure 8.4 shows that mostly female workers were affected by layoffs, the information in the figure alone does not allow conclusions to be drawn about whether women on average faced a greater risk of being laid off. In order to give a rough idea of the likelihood of male and female workers to be laid off, the absolute numbers of affected workers have been divided by the number of men and women employed at the beginning of each year. The quotas are reported in table 8.2. The revealed pattern is inconsistent; in 1921 women faced a much higher risk, whereas men were more exposed in 1927. On average, however, the layoff rates were higher for women than for men (2.2 percent for women to be compared with 1.7 percent for men).

Day labourers were, according to the personnel records, a quite important category of workers. In 1918 they constituted about 15 percent of the total workforce. Although it is not been possible to reconstruct the occupational structure from the personnel records for the period after 1921 it is evident when looking at new hirings that the term was in use throughout the period of our investigation. Curiously, the day labourers encountered in the personnel records are not mentioned in any other archival material reviewed for this thesis. It is puzzling that this group of workers never appears in the correspondence between management and union leaders, in the negotiation minutes, or in the minutes from the union congresses.¹² Most likely it was a local term used only in Malmö.

The obscurity surrounding the day labourers does not only apply to the nature of their employment contract but also to what work they did. In most cases the denotation is used as a job title. There are some cases where more than one job title is recorded and these indicate that day labourers had relatively unskilled or semi-skilled tasks. Out of 519 job spells with the label ‘day labourer’ at Malmö Cigar Factory between 1915 and 1939,¹³ there are 87 cases where an additional job title was recorded: 27 bunchers, 13 preparation workers of different kinds, 10 packers, 10 apprentices (either cigar-cigarettes or sorting), 8 patchers and 7 storage workers. Only one of the day labourers was simultaneously titled ‘cigar worker’. Another striking fact is that very few day labourers (only 5 cases) had a ‘temporary’ status.

A closer look at the day labourers reveals that the group consisted of both men and women; 34 were male and 64 female out of 97 individuals employed on 4 April 1921 (the day before the first round of mass-layoffs). This cross-section shows that the day labourers were relatively young. The median age of day labourers at this point in time was 19 years, which was about four years lower than for preparation workers. The earnings of day labourers were also somewhat lower than for workers with other occupations. Looking at workers under 25 years of age, the average annual earnings of day labourers was 7 percent below the average.¹⁴ If day labourers were used as a buffer to handle

12 A former female cigar worker, employed at the Stockholm factory from 1928 onwards, was consulted but she could not recall any day labourers. Conversation with Siri Carlsson on 8 October 2007.

13 A job spell is here defined as a continuous period of employment within the same occupation at the Tobacco Monopoly.

14 The calculation is based on a cross-section of workers employed on 4 April 1921. For a comparison of the earnings of day labourers with other occupational groups, see Karlsson 2006, p 71.

short-run variations in the demand for labour, the earnings gap compared with other workers should reasonably have increased significantly during the crisis of 1921. This was not the case. The gap in annual earnings did increase, but only from 7 to 8 percent. Most workers suffered from income losses during 1921 due to the indexation of wages and hours-reductions; the day labourers were not more exposed than others.

Two other facts that suggest that day labourers did not have a looser attachment to the company are that they could be laid off ‘due to shortage of work’ and that they in those cases were compensated. If day labourers had been hired on a daily basis it is not likely that an exit reason would have been entered in the personnel records when they left the company, and it is even less likely that they would have been given compensation. Further evidence on the day labourers’ attachment to the company in relation to other workers will be presented in chapter 9.

If the day labourers were not a labour reserve, what were they? Given the lack of qualitative evidence, the most plausible answer to this question is that they were simply paid on a time basis (instead of piece rates) and moved around to do various tasks from day to day. This would explain the lack of a more specific job title.

The collective agreements in the tobacco industry did not include specific terms for temporary workers. However, they were, unlike day labourers, quite frequently mentioned in other qualitative sources. This makes the meaning of the denotation ‘temporary’ less obscure; these workers could not expect continuous employment. For ordinary workers a mutual notification period was applied, if either party wanted to terminate the employment contract, whereas there was no such general stipulation for those hired on a temporary basis.

Referring to temporary female cleaners at a factory in Stockholm, the company management stated that they were hired to work “when needed” and that their hours of work could vary from full time to a few hours a day.¹⁵ Another indication of temporary workers’ looser attachment to the company, apparent in the personnel records, is that no exit reasons were noted in the personnel records when their employment ended and they were not entitled to support when

15 ARAB, STF, Inkomna skrivelser från Tobaksmonopolet, E03: 2 , 25 February 1925, STF, E03: 2, ARAB. With regard to wages, temporary cleaners did not differ from regular cleaners or other workers on time wages.

released. Moreover, workers hired on temporary terms were excluded from the pension schemes.¹⁶

A complicating issue when studying the temporary workers at Malmö Cigar Factory is that the personnel records do not always state when the temporary status began and ended.¹⁷ Thus, the share of temporary workers at various points in time cannot be established.¹⁸ What can be established is the share of new workers that was hired on temporary basis, which is displayed in figure 8.5.

As displayed in the figure, a small but significant number of workers recruited in the expansion of 1916 and 1917 were temporary. The management was probably uncertain about the future need for labour and wanted to retain a degree of flexibility. But, if so, this uncertainty had vanished by 1918. When shortage of raw tobacco became serious in this year, the management not only declared that temporary workers would be the first in line if layoffs were necessary, but also that those temporary workers that were retained would be Figure 8.5 New hirings at Malmö Cigar Factory, 1915-1939

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

1915 1918 1921 1924 1927 1930 1933 1936 1939

Total number of new hirings Temporary

Source: MS, FHK, Matriklar över slutade arbetare, D4A: 1-8.

16 SM, STM, Styrelsens protokoll, 26 September 1921, Bilaga F; SM, STM, Styrelsens protokoll, 17 October 1921.

17 See section A2.8.

18 For workers hired in the late 1920s and onwards ‘temporary’ replaced the job title in the personnel records.

regarded as permanent. A consequence of this decision was that the management could not deal with shortage of work in the early 1920s by releasing temporary workers. This is an important fact to have in mind when assessing the downsizing process of the Tobacco Monopoly. Temporary workers did not totally disappear in the following years but were very few. In 1929 the factory again started to hire temporary workers in significant numbers. The main part of this non-permanent workforce, which exclusively consisted of women,¹⁹ was released in 1932.

In the literature, temporary workers are often characterized as unskilled aspirants without previous experience. This was not the case in the Swedish tobacco industry of the inter-war period. When it came to occupational status, quite a few temporary workers were employed in relatively skilled positions.²⁰ Most of the temporary workers hired by Malmö Cigar Factory in 1916 and 1917 had previously been employed in the industry.²¹ The workers hired in 1929 and 1930 also had previous experience; some had been laid off due to shortage of work in the personnel reductions earlier in the decade and some were re-hired after formal retirement.²² The creation of the personnel reserve can thus be seen as a formalization of an existing practice.