Mitbestimmungsrecht Wins

A cardinal goal of German organized labor is Mitbestimmungsrecht. Literally, it means "the right of codetermination"; it implies union participation in corporate financing, pricing, supply and all other functions of management. (Some observers have seen Mitbestimmungsrecht in Walter Reuther's pronunciamentos on U.S. industry.)

When the Allies, in 1947, set up temporary trusteeships to supplant the Ruhr industrial cartels, they accepted Mitbestimmungsrecht. Labor representatives were given equal positions with management on each of 24 new company trustee boards. Later, all three of Western Germany's big political parties supported some form of Mitbestimmungsrecht, to keep their labor support.

Faced with the imminent return of Ruhr industries to their owners, German union leaders began to wonder what would happen to this postwar gain. Early this January, wizened, 75-year-old Hans

Boeckler, the ex-goldsmith president of the 5,000,000-member German Federation of Trade Unions, decided on a showdown. He threatened Chancellor Konrad Adenauer with a Feb. 1 strike of 225,000 metal workers, if Mitbestimmungsrecht were not guaranteed. The Ruhr's 550,000 miners agreed to join the strike.

Adenauer replied angrily, "It cannot be said that . . . freedom to organize . . . implies the right to cripple the economy in order to force certain acts from the legislature." Businessmen denounced Mitbestimmungsrecht and the unions' "terroristic power." Snapped Fritz Berg, president of the Federation of German Industry, "The back door to Socialism."

Last week Adenauer, aware that the threatened strike might wreck West German and West European recovery and rearmament, called in five labor leaders and five Ruhr industrialists.

For three days the owners held out, then capitulated. On Thursday five jubilant union leaders and Adenauer walked out of the smoky conference room of Bonn's Palais Schaumburg with a new agreement. Labor will have equal representation with management in both the new three-man governing committees and the eleven-man directorates of German coal and steel companies. The odd members will be chosen jointly.

It was labor's biggest postwar victory in continental Europe. Adenauer, relieved of the strike problem, faced a crisis with militant free enterprisers in his own government. The triumphant unionists, confident that the new settlement would become law, made plans to extend Mitbestimmungsrecht to all German industry.

Thus the Corporative Society, so heavily denounced when it was bannered by Mussolini, made its way back into the center of European life.

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