Preliminary Programme

This presentation deals with the pre-1930 transnational mobility of engineers and architects (from technical schools) educated in the Nordic countries between 1880 and 1919. These technicians' mobility system implied higher importance for learning mobility compared to labour market mobility. More than every second graduate went abroad, and transnational mobility was most important in Norway and Finland: partly because these countries experienced slower industrialization and more domestic technical education deficiencies than Sweden and Denmark. This transnational mobility included all parts of the world but concentrated on the leading industrial and educational countries in German-speaking Europe and North America. Significant majorities returned and became agents of technology transfer and technical change. These mobile technical school graduates, thereby, became essential for Nordic industrialization. (Show less)

Scholarship of migration and trade unionism often adopts a national or a local perspective. This is not surprising, considering the importance of nation-state boarders since the First World War, and the fact that workers primarily have been unionised in national and local trade unions. Such an approach, however, risks missing significant transnational contacts between trade unionists. When trade unionists from different countries met within international organisations and at conferences and discussed migrations – among many other issues – they learned from each other’s experiences and got better understandings of both coincident interests and about questions where national interests collided. The overall aim of this paper is to study trade-union internationalism in relation to the post-Second-World-War labour migrations in Europe. Within the context of European integration, the paper sets out to explore which migration-related issues national trade unions put on the international trade-union agenda, and it analyses how national trade unions tried to use the international arena to pursue their own interests. To what extent – and in that case why – did national trade-union interests coincide or differ as regards migration? Thereby, the paper puts the mutual interplay between the national and the international level of the trade-union movement at the centre of attention. The empirical focus is set on the largest of the International Trade Secretariats: The International Metalworkers’ Federation (Show less)