"The history of unionising in Finland stretches back to the late 19th century, when the first worker's unions were founded in the 1880's in the country's industry centres. A salient feature in the early unions was the strong presence of employer interests. The first union leaders were either employers themselves, or members of the educated classes, and the central idea of such unionising was moderate reformism aimed to defuse potential for labour market conflicts, and to reduce worker interest towards socialist politics. A new wave of unionising soon buried this type of conciliatory trade unionism. The end of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century saw the spread of socialist trade unions across the country. The process culminated in 1907 with the founding of Suomen Ammattijärjestö, the first umbrella organisation for industrial trade unions. From the outset, these unions adopted a socialist outlook on the labour market based on the Marxist concept of class struggle. Consequently, they developed an integral relationship to the major political force of Finnish socialism, the Finnish Social Democratic Party. With this grounding orientation, conflict with employers fearful of the spread of socialist ideas was a given. As a countermove, the employers began early on to organise their own employers' unions and specific policies to coordinate countermeasures to unionising and industrial conflict. One countermeasure was to form wage cartels, in the form of multi-employer agreements on industrial wages, and jointly coordinated and distributed lists of known troublemakers, agitators, and strikers. The Finnish Civil War in 1918 marked the final culmination of the early phase of contest. Inspired and encouraged by the Bolshevik coup in Russia, the radical wing of the Social Democrats in Finland set out to take power with the help of the paramilitary Red Guards, strongly based on the personnel of the existing trade unions. Against them rose the non-socialist Whites, with their own paramilitaries, the Civic Guards. The result was a crushing defeat for the Reds, the escape of many of their cadres to Soviet Russia, a wave of White terror against the remaining Reds, and the founding of the Finnish Communist Party in Moscow in August, 1918..."

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