‘I’ Newspaper: Rebecca Long-Bailey Promises to Support Unions and End Exploitative Work Practices

This is another excellent piece from Saturday’s I, for 8th February 2020. Written by Richard Vaughan, ‘Long-Bailey to promise no out-of-hours phone calls’ shows that the contender for the Labour leadership intends to restore the power of the trade unions and back them in industrial disputes, as well as removing work practices that damages workers’ mental health. It begins with her pledge to end the demand that workers should be on call 24 hours a day.

Labour leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey will pledge to give workers the right to switch off their phones outside of office hours to help end “24/7 work cultures”.

The shadow Business Secretary committed yesterday to give employees a “right to disconnect” based on the French system, which forces companies with more than 50 staff to allow them to ignore their mobiles during leisure time.

In a further attempt to show her support for workers, Ms Long-Bailey said she would back the right of employees to hold strike action “no questions asked” should she succeed Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

Addressing a rally in Sheffield last night, she said the next Labour leader must be “as comfortable on the picket line as at the dispatch box.”

“As leader, I’ll put trade unions at the heart of Labour’s path to power, and back workers in every dispute,” she said.

She added that under her stewardship Labour would “back workers in every dispute and strike against unfair, exploitative and unjust employers”.

She said: “Standing on the side of workers and trade unions, no questions asked, is going to be crucial in standing up to this reactionary Conservative Government.”

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Ms Long-Bailey said she wanted to remove working practices that were damaging to mental health. “We can all do better with aspirational socialism, through pushing for an end to 24/7 work culture, and with trade unions empowered to negotiate this, we can work hard, be paid for the work we do and keep that precious time with our friends and family, uninterrupted by emails or demands”.

This is precisely the type of leadership working people need. The Tories and New Labour have done their level best to gut the power of the unions, and the result has been the massive increase in in-work poverty. Without strong trade unions, workers have been left stuck with stagnant wages, exploitative working conditions like zero-hours contracts which bar them from receiving sick pay, paid holidays or maternity leave and a culture that allows work place bullying and casual sacking. Blair and Brown were as keen on destroying union power as the Tories, and in denying workers protection against redundancy and short-term contracts, all in the name of workforce ‘flexibility’. Despite his candidacy for the party being backed by one of the unions, when Blair gained the leadership he even threatened to cut the party’s ties to them, a tie that is integral to the Labour Party, if they didn’t back his reforms and programme.

Long-bailey promises to reverse this, restore union power and so empower ordinary working people. Which means that the Tories and their lackeys in the press and media will do everything they can to discredit her. You can expect them to start running stories about the how the ‘strike-hit’ seventies made Britain ‘the sick man of Europe’ until Maggie Thatcher appeared to curb the union barons and restore British productivity and confidence. It’s all rubbish, but it’s the myth that has sustained and kept the Tories and their wretched neoliberalism in power for forty years.

But this is being challenged, and Long-Bailey is showing that she is the woman to end it.

The History Book on the TUC from Its Beginnings to 1968

The History of the T.U.C. 1868-1968: A Pictorial Survey of a Social Revolution – Illustrated with Contemporary Prints and Documents (London: General Council of the Trades Union Congress 1968).

This is another book on working class history. It’s a profusely illustrated history of the Trades Union Congress from its origins in 1868 to 1968, and was undoubtedly published to celebrate its centenary.

Among the book’s first pages is this photograph show the TUC’s medal, below, which reads: Workingmen of Every Country Unite to Defend Your Rights.

There’s also these two illustrations on facing pages intended to show the TUC as it was then and now.

After the foreword by the-then head of the TUC, George Woodcock, and the list of General Council in 1967-8, the book is divided into four sections on the following periods

1868-1900, on the first Trades Union Congress and the men who brought it to birth.

1900-1928, in which the TUC was consulted by Ministers and began to take part in public administration.

1928-1940, which are described as the TUC’s formative years and the fight for the right to be heard.

and 1928-1940, in which wartime consultation set the pattern for peacetime planning.

These are followed by lists of trade unions affiliated to the TUC circa 1968 and the members of the parliamentary committee from 1868 and the General Council from 1921.

The text includes articles and illustrations on the Royal Commission of Inquiry into trade unions, including a photograph of Queen Victoria’s letter; from the beehive of 1867 to the TUC of 1967; the early leaders of the TUC and the political causes at home and abroad, for which they rallied trade union support; some of the events that led to the TUC’s foundation and the Royal Commission on Trade Unions; the TUC and the Criminal Law Amendment Act; working men voting during the dinner hour; working hours and conditions which the TUC wanted to reform, particularly of women and children; Punch cartoon of the sweated workers exploited for the products displayed at the Great Exhibition; Alexander McDonald, the man behind the miners’ unions; campaigns for compensation for industrial injury and safeguards for sailors; farm labourers’ unions, the public and the church; the advent of state education and the birth of white collar unions; mass unemployment and demonstrations in the Great Depression of the 1880; the trade union leaders of the unemployed and their political allies; squalor and misery in London; forging the first link with American unions; the TUC on the brink of the 20th century; the ‘new unionism’ and the matchgirls’ strike; the dockers’ strike of 1889; the birth of the Labour Party in 1906; passage into law of the TUC’s own trade union charter; the trade unions and the beginnings of the foundation of the welfare state by the Liberals; Women trade unionists, the Osborne Judgement; the introduction into Britain of French and American syndicalism; the great dock strike of 1911, and the great transport strike of 1912; the Daily Herald; Will Dyson’s cartoons; the TUC on the eve of World War I; the War; the wartime revolution in trade unions; the TUC’s contribution to the war effort; rise of shop stewards; the impact of the Russian Revolution on the British Labour movement; peace time defeat; the appearance of Ernest Bevin; the replacement of the Parliamentary Committee by the General Council in the TUC in 1921; the first proposal for the nationalisation of the coal mines; 1924, when Labour was in office but the trade unions were left out in the cold; the gold standard and the General Strike; the Strike’s defeat and punitive Tory legislation; the TUC’s examination of union structure after the Strike; TUC ballots the miners to defeat company unionism; Transport House in 1928; the Mond-Turner talks and consultations between workers’ and employers’ organisations; Walter Citrine and the IFTU; the 1929 Labour government; opposition to McDonald-Snowden economies; McDonald’s 1931 election victory; propaganda posters for the National Government; the 1930s; the state of industry and TUC plans for its control; union growth in the young industries; young workers fighting for a fair chance; the TUC and the British Commonwealth; the Nazi attack on the German unions; the TUC and the international general strike against the outbreak of war; the waning of pacifism inside the TUC; the Labour Movement and the Spanish Civil War; Neville Chamberlain and ‘Peace in our Time’; summer, 1939, and the outbreak of World War II; Churchill’s enlistment of the TUC and Labour Party in government; the coalition government and the unions; TUC organises aid to Russia after the Nazi invasion; plans for post-War reconstruction; the TUC, godfather to the Welfare State; the Cold War; the bleak beginning of public industries in 1947; David Low’s cartoons of the TUC; the drive for productivity; the Tories and the Korean War; TUC aid to Hungary and condemnation of Suez; the official opening of Congress House; TUC intervention in industrial disputes; trade union structure; from pay pause to planning; trade unionists given a role in industry; government pressure for a prices and incomes policy; TUC overseas contacts; and recent changes to the TUC.

The book’s an important popular document of the rise of the TUC from a time when unions were much more powerful than they were. They were given a role in government and industrial movement. Unfortunately, the continuing industrial discontent of the post-War years have been played on by nearly every government since Thatcher’s victory in 1979. The result is stagnant and falling wages, increasingly poor and exploitative conditions and mass poverty and misery. All justified through Zombie laissez-faire economics. Corbyn offered to reverse this completely, and give working people back prosperity and dignity. But 14 million people were gulled and frightened by the Tories and the mass media into rejecting this.

Strong trade unions are working people’s best method for expressing their economic and political demands along with a strong Labour party, one that works for working people, rather than solely in the interest of the employers and the financial sector. Which is why the Tories want to destroy them and are keen that books like these should be forgotten.

Let’s fight against them, and make sure that books like this continue to inspire and inform working class people in the future.

 

Solidarity Pamphlet on Bolsheviks’ Destruction of Workers’ Control in Russian Revolution

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control/ 1917-1921/ The State and Counter-Revolution (London: Solidarity 1970).

I picked this short book – 89 pages – in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham. Solidarity were a libertarian Communist group that believed that the workers should operate and manage the means of production. In their statement of beliefs at the back of the book, they state in point 9 ‘We do not accept the view that by itself the working class can only achieve a trade union consciousness.’ (p. 89). This is a direct contradiction of Lenin’s belief, firmly expressed in his 1905 pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, that the workers could only achieve trade union consciousness, and needed to be led to Socialism by a group of dedicated revolutionaries. The book itself states that it is a work of history, which intends to show how the Bolsheviks betrayed the revolution of 1917 by suppressing the movement for workers’ control in the factories and the workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ soviets.

The Revolution had begun when Russia’s working people rose up against Tsarism and the Kerensky government that replaced it. They formed factory committees which took over the management of the factories to various degrees in industry, and formed the soviets – councils – of working people across Russia, which formed a parallel system of popular government to that of the duma, the Russian parliament. Communist historiography has presented Lenin as fully behind these developments. He passed a decree stating that ‘workers’ control is established in the factories’ and praised the soviets, proclaiming the slogan, ‘All Power to the Workers’ Soviets’. The conventional historical view states that the workers were in fact unable to run industry, and so the government was forced to reintroduce the entrepreneurs, managers and technicians that the workers had previously turfed out of the factory gates in wheelbarrows.

This pamphlet shows that the opposite was true. From initially supporting them as a bulwark against the return of capitalism, and a necessary precondition for the nationalisation of industry, Lenin turned to active dislike and opposition, but was forced to support them for reasons of expediency. Lenin, Trotsky and their faction in the Bolsheviks really wanted Russian industry to be managed by a state bureaucracy, with a single person in command of individual factories and enterprises. Lenin adopted the slogan to present himself and his faction as fully behind the soviet revolution, while doing everything he could behind the scenes to reduce this to a mere slogan. Their practical strategy for destroying the factory committees involved incorporating them into the trade unions. These had always been under political control in Russia, partly through necessity as for most of the time they were illegal. The Bolsheviks in turn transformed these from popular organisations to campaign for better wages and conditions, to instruments of the Bolshevik party to discipline and organise Russian labour, so that it obeyed the state and the managers. It was the trade unions that set wages and determined working conditions. At the same time as they were being absorbed by the unions, the committees were gradually stripped over their powers until they were finally dissolved following the Kronstadt rebellion, which was intended to restore democracy to the Revolution by overthrowing Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks were also actively destroying democracy throughout the system of government and industrial management by gradually removing elections and replacing them with political appointments. As part of this, the trade unions could elect their members to the various Bolshevik political organs, but this became subject to the party’s veto. Candidates elected by the unions not approved by Lenin and his faction could be blocked.

This resulted in the construction of the totalitarian, monolithic Soviet state, while industry saw the removal of workers’ power and the return of the very industrialists and entrepreneurs, who had been overthrown. Indeed, after the failure of authoritarian ‘war communism’, with its forced requisitions of food from the peasantry during the Civil War, 1921 saw the limited return of capitalism itself in the establishment of a private sector as part of the New Economic Policy.

Not all of the Bolsheviks were in favour of this policy, and Lenin, Trotsky and their faction faced bitter opposition from a series of groups and individuals within the party, including Preobrazhensky, Osinsky, Bukharin and Alexandra Kollontai, in the ‘Democratic Centralists’ and ‘Left Communists’. Despite their efforts, theirs was a losing battle and in the end they were fighting a series of rearguard actions to preserve the last vestiges of the factory committees and the autonomy of the trade unions.

Outside the party, the Bolsheviks also faced opposition from anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, who also wished to preserve the factory committees from attacks from the party and the trade unions. The booklet discusses the increasing mass arrests of these, and the closure of a range of anarchist newspapers and magazines, such as Burevestnik, Anarkhia and Golos Truda (Workers’ Voice). The final demands of the Left Communists for trade union autonomy and its management of industry was also denounced by Lenin as ‘anarcho-syndicalist deviation’.

Apart from its description of the way the Bolsheviks overturned the founding principles of the revolution, supplanting control and management by the workers themselves, with a system of control and management by the party, its functionaries, and returned capitalist businessmen in the name of the workers, the pamphlet’s also interesting for discussing the various literature produced by the revolutionaries and their plans for instituting practical system of workers’ control. For example, the Exploratory Conference of Factory Committees of Petrograd War Industries, convened on April 2nd, 1917, issued the proclamations that

From the Factory Committee should emanate all instructions concerning internal factory organisation (i.e. instructions concerning such mattes as hours of work, wages, hiring and firing, holidays, etc.) The factory manager to be kept notified…

The whole administrative personnel (management at all levels and technicians) is taken on with the consent of the Factory Committee which has to notify the workers of its decisions at mass meetings of the whole factory or through shop committees…

The Factory committee controls managerial activity in the administrative, economic and technical fields … representatives of the Factory Committee must be provided, for information, with all official documents of the management, production budgets and details of all times entering or leaving the factory … (p.2).

The Kharkov Conference of Factory Committees, held on May 29th that same year, declared that the committees should become

organs of the Revolution… aiming at consolidating its victories. The Factory Committees must take over production, protect it, develop it. They must fix wages, look after hygiene, control the technical quality of products, decree all internal factory regulations and determine solutions all conflicts. (p.4).

The Second Conference of Factory Committees of Petrograd, held at the Smolny Institute from the 7th-12th August, also stipulated that

‘All decrees of Factory Committees’ were compulsory ‘for the factory administration as well as for the workers and employees – until such time as those decrees were abolished by the Committee itself, or by the Central Soviet of Factory Committees’. The pamphlet states that

the committees were to meet regularly during working working hours. Meetings were to be held on days designated by the Committees themselves. Members of the Committees were to receive full pay – from the employers – while on Committee business. Notice to the appropriate administrative personnel was to be deemed sufficient to free a member of the Factory Committee from work so that he might fulfil his obligations to the Committee. In the periods between meetings, selected members of the Factory Committees were to occupy premises, within the factory, at which they could receive information from the workers and employees. Factory administrations were to provide funds ‘for the maintenance of the Committees and the conduct of their affairs’. Factory Committees were to have ‘control over the composition of the administration and the right to dismiss all those who could not guarantee normal relations with the workers or who were incompetent for other reasons’. ‘All administrative factory personnel can only into service with the consent of the Factory Committee, which must declare its (sic!) hirings at a General Meeting of all the factory or through departmental or workshop committees. The ‘internal organisation’ of the factory (working time, wages, holidays, etc.) was also to be determined by the Factory Committees. Factory Committees were to have their own press and were ‘to inform the workers and employees of the enterprise concerning their resolutions by posting an announcement in conspicuous place’. (pp. 8-9).

The Wikipedia entry on Solidarity states that the group was always small, but played a disproportionately large role in the industrial disputes of the 1970s and the campaign for workers’ control and management in industry. The system of complete workers’ control set up during the Russian Revolution is far too extreme to be popular in Britain, at least at present and the foreseeable future. Worker’s involvement in management has still been put back on the agenda, even if in a half-hearted way by Theresa May, no doubt as a calculated deception. The pamphlet itself remains a fascinating description of this optimistic movement in Russian revolutionary history, and its betrayal by the Communist party, and is an important corrective to the standard view that workers’ control was fully supported by them.

Factory Councils and Workers’ Co-Determination in Austria: Part 2

This is the second part of my translation of Co-Determination at the Workplace: The Constitutional Law on Work (Vienna: Federal Press Service 1983). As I said, this is very much not an official translation, and the information in it is more than thirty years out of date, so please don’t take it as a guide to present-day Austrian employment law. As I said, I put it up because it shows the system of factory councils and associated bodies, which give Austrian, and German workers some official representation and participation in the management of factories and businesses.

Extensive Co-Determination in Personal Matters

A range of measures can only be legally enacted by the factory owner with the express agreement of the factory council:

* The execution of factory disciplinary orders.
* The planning of staff questionnaires, in so far as they are to include not only general information about the person and about the technical assumptions for the proposed employment of the employees.
* The execution of control measures and technical systems for the control of employees, as far as these measures (systems) affect human dignity.
* In so far as regulations in the collective agreement do not exist, the execution and regulation of performance related pay.

The right of co-operation of the factory council in staff matters are especially important. The factory council is to be informed in advance of staff planning, the recruitment of employees and the placement of works accommodation, at its wish matters from the employees are to be consulted with it.

That is equally valid for an employee’s proposed promotion. Promotion is every raise in employment at the factory, which is connected to a higher ranking in the pay scheme or otherwise with a rise in salary. If the factory owner infringes one of these decisions, he can only be punished with a fine.

The settlement of efficiency wages in individual cases can, if the employee himself doesn’t agree to it, take place with the consent of the factory council. The transfer of an employee to a bad work place or the infliction of disciplinary measures also requires the agreement of the factory council. Agreements of the factory council to a settlement can also be superseded by one from the Settlement Office.

Veto on Dismissal

The factory council’s position in cases of employee’s dismissal is particularly strong. The entrepreneur must inform the factory council in advance of the proposed dismissal; the factory council can contest the dismissal within a determined time through the settlement office (an arrangement for the mediation of disputes over workers’ rights which exists outside the factory).

Appeals against dismissal by the factory council is allowed in two cases: if the dismissal has taken place because of the activities of the employee for the trade union or the factory council, and if the dismissal is socially unjustified. A dismissal is socially unjustified, which adversely affects the employee’s present interests. Dismissal is nevertheless also permitted in this case, if the entrepreneur brings proof, that the dismissal is based on conditions, which lie in the person of the employee and adversely affect the factory’s interests or factory requirements oppose the further employment of the employee. In practice that means, that a dismissal, which means social hardship for the person dismissed, is only then admissible, if the dismissed person has allowed any such offence to be his fault, or if it has been unavoidable because of a necessary reduction of the employee’s condition.

On the basis of the factory council’s possible veto against dismissal, it is necessary that the entrepreneur establishes contact with the factory council early before the proposed dismissal measures and discusses matters precisely. Pains can be taken with that, to find ways, in which the necessary measures can be carried out with as little social difficulties as possible. Frequently the help of the state administration of the labour market is is also called on.

Economic Proposals

In the frame of the factory council’s right to co-operate in economic matters the factory owner has to give information to the factory council about the economic position of the factory, the type and size of production, orders in hand, quantity and value of sales, investment plans, as well as about other measures to raise the factory’s efficiency. The factory council can lay before the entrepreneur proposals on all these areas. In middle and larger factories the entrepreneur has to convey annually to the factory council the balance, including the accounts of profit and loss. The factory council is also to be given supporting documents, and explanations as required, to understand them.

The entrepreneur is further bound to inform the factory council of planned changes to the factory, as early as possible and consult with it about them. Changes to the factory comprise especially the reduction or closure of the whole factory, the factory’s transfer, its combination with other factories, changes to the factory’s purpose, equipment, work and factory organisations, the introduction of new working methods, the introduction of measures for rationalising and automation, and of considerable significance and change for the factory’s legal forms or property relations. The factory council can deliver proposals for preventing, removing, or ameliorating the detrimental consequences of such measures for the employees. The factory council also has to take into consideration with that the factory’s economic necessities. In factories with at least 20 employees a factory agreement can be concluded over appropriate measures.

The factory council is further entitled to co-operate in the company’s organs in joint-stock companies. These rights, recognised as ‘co-determination’ as well as the right to invoke the state economic commission are handled in more detail later.

Legal Protection for Factory Councils

The law provides for the protection of the members of the factory council from arbitrary dismissal by an entrepreneur, that the dismissal of a member of the factory council can only take place with the agreement of the Settlement Office. The Settlement Office is only allowed to agree to the dismissal of a member of the factory council, if the factory council’s workplace does not exist any more because of alterations to the factory and he can not be employed any more in one of the other workplaces in the factory, if the member of the factory council is not able to perform his work any more, or if he persistently violates his duty. A dismissal is also possible because of quite gross offences by the member of the factory council. In all cases, in which a proposal for the dismissal or release of a member of the factory council is based on his personal conduct in the exercise of his mandate, the Settlement Office, has to consider, whether this behaviour, was based on the function of the member of the factory council – the representation of the employee’s interests.

In practice these decisions means, that a member of the factory council can only be dismissed or released, if he commits serious, inexcusable offences, or further employment in the factory is not possible due to factory reasons (above all from the serious reduction of numbers of staff). In the last instance, nevertheless, the rule in doubt, is that the members of the factory council are the last to be eliminated from a factory.

Apart from the factory council, for which they are nevertheless not entitled to vote, there are youth trust councils, which are also convoked and elected by young people, for the protection of the special rights of youthful employees. The youth trust councils are elected similarly to the factory councils through secret ballot and exercise in collaboration with members of the factory council analogous functions for young people. They also are covered by similar protective decisions regarding the dismissal and release as factory council members.

The Role of the Trade Unions in the Factory

In connection with the business of negotiating for the employees’ organisations and the trade unions at the level above the factory, and especially in connection with the employees’ organisation in the factories, the question arises of the legal regulation of the trade union organisations. In Austria the trade unions are not subject to their own legislation, but fall under the common law on associations, which proceed from the principle of freedom of association, protected by the constitution. Legal regulations thus merely relate to which rights belong to the trade unions in their capacity as recognised bodies capable of collective agreements.

Except for the already mentioned right to concluded collective agreements, it deals with the right of access of trade union officials to the factory. The factory councils can draw on the organs of the trade unions for consultation in all matters at any time. In these cases, and so far as this otherwise necessary for the exercise of the powers granted to them through the Constitutional Law on Work, the factory owners have to grant the organs of the trade unions access to the factory. He is to be informed prior to the forthcoming visit. Further, the organs of the trade union are to be invited to the factory assembly and also in these cases access is to be granted. The factory council is free to consult a representative of the trade union for the regular consultation with the factory owners mentioned above. It has to inform the factory owner in time for this work. In factories, in which there is no factory council, the trade union can take the initiative under agreed conditions through which a factory assembly is convened to prepare a factory council election.

The constitutional law on work also establishes that staff organs in the factory should proceed with the realisation of its tasks in agreement with the trade unions.

According to the statutes of the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions the elected members of the factory council (as far as they belong to the trade union, which is almost always the case) automatically constitute the trade union’s board in the factory group. In trade union practice, this means that the factory council elections, and also equally, as a rule, the original elections for the trade union functionaries, are elected in an indirect electoral system from the local level to the district and land level up to the federal level.
The Factory Agreements

In principle the entrepreneur and the factory council are free to conclude agreements, which also have effects on the particular work negotiations according to prevailing jurisdiction. Such agreements are met above all in the area of wage rights. In its frame, for example, are agreed higher wages than the set minimum wage established in the collective agreement. Beyond this are special regulations concluded for wage additions, frequently at the factory level. There are nevertheless factory agreements, which are naturally legally dependent on the agreement of the factory council, such as the initiation of a disciplinary order, the introduction of staff questionnaires, as far as it does not only deal with general information on their person, furthermore the execution of control measures, if these affect human dignity (for example, control system to tap telephone conversations) and finally regulation of remuneration for performance, which means payment systems, which rest on performance (for example, piece-work). The last regulation is only valid, as far as the collective agreement does not assign a regulation.

Free factory agreements are not especially regulated in the Constitutional Law on Work, which are concluded on the basis of the law itself or on the basis of the authority of collective agreement. The law provides a whole range of matters, about which such factory agreements can be concluded between the entrepreneur and the factory council. Even the settlement of a factory agreement can be compelled in several matters. If a factory agreement in these cases is not reached, a mediation agency makes a decision on the offer of one of the conflicting parties, which is proportionally put together from the representatives of the employer and employees.

The settlement of a factory agreement is compelled about the following questions in the form outlined:

* General orders, regulating the conduct of the employees in the factory.
* General establishment of the beginning and end of the working day, the duration and position of breaks and the division of work time in particular days of the week.
* The type and means of deductions and especially the time and place for the payment of salaries.
* Measures for the prevention, removal or amelioration of the consequences of an alteration to the factory, as far as this brings with its present disadvantages for everyone or an increased part of the workforce.
* The type and scope of the participation of the factory council in the administration of the factory and the enterprises own training, educational and welfare arrangements.
* Measures for the use of factory arrangements and factory resources appropriate to the purpose.

Apart from these matters, about which the factory council can compel the settlement of a factory agreement, there are a multitude of subjects, about which factory agreements are likewise possible with a legally valid action between the factory council and the management of the enterprise. To these matters belong, among others:

* Directions for the award of works accommodation
* Measures for forms of work according to human justice
* Methods of making proposals in the factory
* Profit-sharing systems
* Factory pensions and payment of retirement money
* Methods for making a complaint in the factory.

Altogether 24 areas of rights are specified in the law, about which factory agreements can be concluded. This specification is an estimate. Agreements between enterprise management and factory councils about other matters are merely free factory agreements, whose legal validity would have to be bested in individual cases.

Tertiary Representation of Employees in the Supervisory Councils

Austrian enterprise law also provides for a supervisory organ for joint-stock companies apart from the organs of complaint for the daily business management. As a rule, this supervisory organ is called the Supervisory Council. Especially extensive powers fall to the share of the supervisory council in joint-stock companies, and partly in co-operatives. In joint stock companies the supervisory council elects the members of the board, which applies itself to the business’ management.

The Constitutional Law on Work now gives the factory council (where there are several factories, the central factory council) the right to appoint a third of the members of the supervisory council from the circle of the members of the factory council. The members of the supervisory council, who have been sent by the employees must thus be serving members of the enterprise.

The employee’s representatives in the supervisory council fundamentally have the same rights and duties, as those members of the supervisory council elected by the businesses meetings of the shareholders. However, apart from a majority of votes in the supervisory council a majority of the votes of those members of the supervisory council, who were elected by the shareholders’ meetings, is required for the appointment of the board of managing directors and the election of the chairman as well as its first representation.

Two of the workers’ representatives in the supervisory council in particular also have the possibility to demand at any time a report from the board about company matters, including their relations tot eh group of enterprises.

In combines, in which the parent company employs less than a third of the employees of the whole combine, there is the possibility, for the factory councils of the daughter companies to cooperate in the election of employees’ representatives in the parent company’s supervisory board.

The decisions about the tertiary representation in the supervisory council for joint-stock companies are valid independently of the numbers of their employees. A tertiary representation in the supervisory council, is also provided with that to companies with a limited liability, also independently of the number of its employees, although such companies must only then appoint a supervisory council, if they employ more than three hundred employees. Tertiary representation in supervisory councils first comes into affect in co-operatives, if they employ at least 40 employees.

These regulations, which have been fought about particularly vehemently, for Austria mean a present broadening of the right of co-determination in factory organs. Up to 1974 it was only provided, that two representatives of the factory council should belong to the supervisory council in joint-stock companies. In other forms of companies generally not representation of the workforce in the supervisory council was prescribed. A representation of the employees in the managing organs of the companies (like, for example, in the board of directors of joint-stock companies) is not striver for by the Austrian trade unions.

The State Economics Commission

In factories with more than two hundred employees the factory council can raise an objection with the entrepreneur against alterations to the factory or other economic measures, as far as they bring with them disadvantages for the employees. A factory closure can be delayed for four weeks through this objection. If no agreement is reached in direct negotiations between factory council and the enterprise management about the planned measure, a mediation commission can be called in, formed proportionally by the sides of the employers and employees, whose task it is, to mediate and work towards an agreement of the conflicting parties. The mediation commission can nevertheless only then pronounce an award, when both the conflicting parties submit themselves before its award.

In factories with more than four hundred employees, if the efforts of the mediation commission are in vain, an appeal can the be raised above the Austrian Trade Union Federation with the State Economics Commission. Apart from representatives from the side of the employers and employees, representatives from the federal government also belong to the State Economics Commission. It is also their task to mediate between the conflicting parties and to deliver suggestions for the settlement of the points at issue. If an agreement also is not reached with the help of the State Economic Commission, the factory owner has to convey all the necessary supporting documents to this commission for it to handle the objection. The State Economic Commission has to establish in the form of an expert opinion, whether the objection is justified.

Agencies of Labour Constitution

The agreement offices mentioned, which, for example, have to decide in questions of dismissal, to which representatives nominated by the state also belong, apart from the representatives from the sides of the employers and employees, are permanent state agencies. These are to make decisions according to hearings of the employers’ and employees’ organisation.

The mediation agency, which, for example, is responsible for the enforcement of factory agreements, is newly assembled for every particular case of conflict. Representatives of the sides of the employers and employees belong to it, in which, in each case, a representative on each side of the factory in question should be represented in the mediation agency. It is presided over by a professional judge.

Rights and Duties

The entire Constitutional Law on Work is based on the principle mentioned at the beginning, which is also anchored in the text of the law: the goal of the decision about the constitution of the factory and of its application to it is to bring about an equalization of interests to the welfare of the employee and the factory.

For that the rights of the factory council have been so far developed, that in practice is becomes necessary for the entrepreneur to strive for a successful co-operation with his factory council. As the law gives the factory council the possibilities of taking an influence in so many particular questions, that a factory, in which there is a lasting conflict between management and the factory council, would be severely hampered in his work.

There far-reaching possibilities for the factory council and the necessity, which results from it, of the management and factory council co-operating, means, however, not just rights, but also duties for the factory council. The factory council has with its possibility of making co-decisions, then naturally as has a co-responsibility. It bears this responsibility not only towards the enterprise, but above all towards the employees, who have elected it, and which it has to represent.

The efforts for an equalization of interests are not just a lip service for the entrepreneurs and trade unions of Austria. That is proven amongst other things by the parliamentary decisions agreed about the Constitutional Law on Work, which has been realised after protracted negotiations about its extremely complicated matters at the end of the 1973. Once again the system of partnership has provide, that is has contributed so much to economic and social progress in Austria.