Word: workers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Inside Germany, the Brandt government has pledged to give workers' representatives not just a voice, but an equal voice in company policymaking. It proposes to require all major German corporations to establish boards composed of equal numbers of workers' and stockholders' representatives, with an impartial chairman acceptable to both sides. At present only the coal and steel industries have to give labor that much say, but the idea is moving beyond German borders. In Switzerland three trade unions have petitioned the country's Parliament to call a national referendum on labor's right...
...third will speak for shareholders, and the remaining third will be chosen by the first two groups. Predictably, corporate leaders have been horrified. Even in Germany, some heads of major corporations predict that giving labor an equal voice in company planning will lead only to endless deadlock, with the worker-directors vetoing everything that the shareholder-directors want to do, and vice versa...
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...
There is a legitimate question, though, whether that spirit can be extended. In Germany itself, labor peace was shattered late last summer by a series of wildcat strikes. Having a voice in company planning did not soothe workers who were unhappy about rising prices and the modest wage hikes negotiated by their unions early last year (worker-directors stay out of pay bargaining, which is conducted by regional unions and 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...
Died. Harold Bingham Lee, 74, president of the 3.3 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; of lung and heart failure; in Salt Lake City. Lee rose to prominence in church circles as a welfare worker during the Depression, eventually developed the program into a $20 million enterprise. Named a member of the church's governing Council of the Twelve Apostles in 1941, Lee was one of the youngest men ever to become "prophet, seer, and revelator" of the Mormons. Lee succeeded 95-year-old Joseph Fielding Smith upon his death 18 months...