Dialogue in Vienna

...There were sharp divisions of opinion regarding the viability of workers' control...

...Thus, under the co-determination law, the labor director is appointed through the unions and has an equal voice with other directors on plant decisions...

...In practice, however, participation simply creates a confusion of roles...

...In many factories, Communist party members are ineligible for office in the workers' councils...

...The historic ideology of Left intellectuals, he pointed out, has been to favor participation...

...Against the negativism of the British unions and the total participation of the Yugoslav councils, a third approach to a role for workers' control was suggested, independently, in papers by Dr...

...In effect, then, the union man acts as personnel director in the plant and faces shop committees as a representative of management In practice, the system tends to humanize shop relations...

...it assumes that workers' interests can be identical with those of management, but they are not...

...On the meaning of workers control today By Daniel Bell Dialogue in Vienna IN THE LAST 15 years, a remarkable set of experiments in industrial democracy have been taking place: the workers' councils in Yugoslavia and Poland...

...But they denied the contentions of Professor Adolf Sturmthal of Roosevelt College, who had spent the summer in Yugoslavia, and argued that on key decisions the councils had no real authority if the Communist party opposed a policy...

...that where there is a willingness to confront intellectual issues squarely the old political dogmas and classifications have little merit in providing understanding of contemporary issues...

...This was the experience of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in previous seminars and conferences at Milan, Hamburg, Tokyo and Oxford...

...Eric Trist of the Tavistock Institute in London, Paul Barton of France, and this writer...

...They are the result of a deliberate movement, initiated by young intellectuals, to create autonomous centers free of Party control...

...In Poland, the workers' councils that arose in October 1956 do not...

...But many delegates voiced skepticism that co-determination actually gives the worker a sense of participation in a firm, or of policy control...

...In its most naive form, the syndicates sought to run plants by a committee of workers and by the taking of decisions by mass vote...

...co-determination in Germany and Austria...

...as in Hungary, owe their existence to the spontaneous reaction of workers in plants...

...In Yugoslavia, workers' council delegates have a voice in all the decisions of an enterprise, including price setting (although Government turnover taxes may more than quadruple prices), wage rates and the allocation of profits, if any...

...In Germany and Austria, where autocratic employer power has traditionally been high, and strengthened by cartel organization, the unions have sought by law to compel worker participation in management...

...But in large and complex organizations, questions of span of control, scheduling, pricing, allocation, etc., are clearly managerial functions and cannot be decided by mass vote...

...The differences in approach of the various union movements have arisen, obviously, out of the individual experiences of these movements...

...Could those forms of participation, it was asked, be adopted by other countries, particularly the newly industrializing nations...

...The works councils in the plants are independent of the unions...

...it was confirmed once again at Vienna...

...The experiments in industrial democracy represent one such effort, which explains the Congress's interest in the subject...

...The Yugoslav workers' councils were created "from above" by the Tito regime, to emphasize the ideological differences between the Yugoslav and the Russian roads to socialism...

...In fact, some Party ideologists have gone so far as to assert that trade unions ought to be eliminated entirely...

...While the policv issues implied could be subject to union challenge (democrarv by consent) the actual on-rating decisions have to be made by the trained managerial group...

...In the past, the slogan of workers' control has been confused with political issues...

...This was the argument that the real function of worker participation and control was on the job itself: in the formation of autonomous work groups, in the control of pace and rhythm, in the determination of production standards and the like...

...He recently returned from Europe...

...This is not less democratic than participation, he argued, since it is democracy by consent...

...Comites des Enterprises in France plus private experiments in worker communal arrangements in Italy (the Olivetti plants) and India (the Tata enterprises...

...The basic question considered was simple: In an increasingly bureaucratized world, can we develop autonomous social forms that give individuals a greater say over the control of their lives...

...But the area of the job itself, the area that affects the worker, is one that should be subject to direct worker control...

...The paper by this writer, reviewing the history of the themes of exploitation and alienation in socialist literature, argued that the question of alienation in work would be resolved not by change in formal property relations, as Marxist theory once held, but through the reorganization of the work process itself...

...The presence of a union man director also may act as a check on the political use of company funds-which was one of the motives of the unions and Socialists in pressing for co-determination...

...The British unions in the nationalized industries, Clegg said, prefer to maintain their independent status in order to act as a check on management...

...The representatives from Yugoslavia who included A. Deleon, secretary of the National Union Federation and Dr...

...In Germany, the unions have no roots in the plants...

...A firm that fails goes into "socialist bankruptcy...

...Present were scholars, union officials, management people and journalists from 20 countries...

...And Dr...

...they simply bargain with employers on a national, regional or industry-wide basis...

...But today unions are being called on to increase output, and they are finding it difficult to accept the new role...

...Even the argument in socialist countries that "the factories belong to the workers" remains unconvincing, especially when workers feel that the surplus goes either to new privileged classes or to build up heavy industry for a "future" they will not see...

...It has been said, by Raymond Aron among others, that this is the end of the age of ideology...

...Trist, a clinical psychologist presented some fascinating experiments in the creation of autonomous work groups in British coal mines and Indian textile mills, as evidence of the viability of the group-decision process...

...In the West (except for those with avowedly revolutionary aims), the trade unions historically have been defensive and restrictive organizations...

...The countries with the strongest trade unions such as England, the U.S...

...joint consultation in nationalized industries in Britain...

...Daniel Bell, former labor editor of Fortune, is now a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California...

...Such councils obviously can become a threat to a regime, and in the last six months it has begun to absorb them into the Government-dominated unions...

...Most heartening was the lack of dogmatism (evident among the Yugoslavs as well) and the awareness that the complex problems of large-scale organization and individual identity would not be solved by old shibboleths...

...The British position was stated forcefully by Hugh Clegg of Nuffield College Oxford Perhaps the foremost student of British unionism, he drew a distinction between "democracy through participation" and "democracy by consent...

...They seek not only to limit the arbitrary and capricious power of management but to limit output ("don't work yourself out of a job") and to enforce job scarcity...

...The workers' councils in Yugoslavia and Poland represent, in origin, special circumstances...

...Pasich, head of the new Social Research Institute in Belgrade, admitted various imperfections in the system...

...A conference which heard reports and discussed the diverse experiences of 15 countries is difficult to summarize adequately...

...and Scandinavia, tended to reject the idea of worker participation in management...

...The role of the union — which is distinct from the workers' councils — is a curious one...

...But the situation is an anomaly...

...trade-union owned enterprises in Israel...

...The lesson of Hungary and Poland—as in the shop stewards' movement in Britain during World War I—is that when unions function not to protect but to control workers, workers will seek substitute forms of expressions...

...To assess these experiments, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, in association with several Austrian colleges, recently held an international seminar in Vienna...