Word: mitbestimmung
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...actual running of companies to management, preferring to stress the bread-and-butter issues of wages, hours and working conditions. But in Europe, worker participation in management decision making is an established idea that keeps spreading continually into more countries and industries. The practice, known in German as Mitbestimmung (literally, having a voice in), took root shortly after World War II in West Germany, where coal miners and steel workers began sitting alongside bosses on industry supervisory boards. In recent years, the notion of giving workers a greater say in the companies that hire them has gained vast new momentum...
...exporting jobs rather than cars angered two powerful factions on VW's 21-man supervisory board of directors: the members representing the government's 40% ownership of the company and the workers' representatives, who sit on the board under West Germany's system of Mitbestimmung (co-determination) in corporate management...
...President Edward Cole, might seem farfetched. Yet something very like this arrangement has existed since 1952 in West Germany, where under law all large companies must give at least a third of the seats on their supervisory boards* to directors representing their workers. Now this system, known as Mitbestimmung (literally, having a voice), is spreading throughout Western Europe and has become the subject of heated controversy...
Shattered Peace. In fact, Mitbestimmung has worked better than that in the German coal and steel industries. The worker representatives (who include not only unionists but government officials and even, in one case, a banker considered sympathetic to labor) have been notably cooperative, and probably deserve some of the credit for having kept the German economic boom remarkably free of strikes. The ten labor directors of steelmaking August Thyssen-Hütte approved a takeover of troubled competitor Rheinstahl, which is still awaiting Common Market clearance, knowing that it would mean the elimination of some duplicate jobs. Says Thyssen Director...
...federations of employers). And would the cooperative attitude of Germany's soberly capitalist labor leaders be matched by representatives of strike-happy British unions, or Communist-led French and Italian unions, who might sit on company boards? Organized labor in France and Italy voices an opposite fear: that Mitbestimmung would only lead worker-directors to become too chummy with management...