Programme

Participation at work is the result of historical labour struggles, but also of the increasing complexity of factory-based production models (Plumpe 1999). In Germany, workplace co-determination was first made compulsory for certain companies in 1916 as part of a class compromise between capital and labour, and was finally given a legal basis and extended to all companies with more than 20 employers in 1920 with the Works Council Act.
However, the history of co-determination in the Weimar Republic cannot be written based on the Works Council Act alone. I propose to study it as a process of norm formation at the workplace level involving a number of actors, particularly non-state actors. This means that the Works Council Act does not simply provide the legal 'framework' within which actors move. (Show less)

Following the German revolution, the occupation of the Ruhr, putsches, and rampant inflation, the Weimar Republic calmed down after 1923. The young state, brought into being largely by Social Democrats, introduced universal and free suffrage. Its formal democracy was exemplary by contemporary standards. However, this only applied to state
institutions — the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Allgemeiner Deutscher
Gewerkschaftsbund (Trade Union Confederation, ADGB) believed that pre-democratic economic structures had persisted. From 1925 onwards, a joint SPD and ADGB commission developed a programme for the further expansion of democracy in the economy, which Fritz Naphtali published in 1928.1
In reference to Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s “Industrial Democracy”,2 the economic policy programme called for a far-reaching democratisation of the economy: “co-determination by all economic comrades”.3
After 1945, the programme was adopted not only in West Germany, but internationally, for example in Israel (Histadrut).
The aim of “Wirtschaftsdemokratie” was the “replacement of free competition by planned regulation”.4 The means and the objective was the so-called "Gemeinwirtschaft” (public economy). “Gemeinwirtschaft” was understood to include enterprises that were not run for
individual profit, but collectively for the benefit of a community. Public services,
cooperatives, and trade union-owned enterprises and other institutions were considered to be “enterprises of the many, for the many”. These enterprises were to expand as “oases in the capitalist desert” and pave the way for a socialist and democratic economic order of the future. Capitalism, according to the guiding conviction of the programme’s authors, could “also be bent before it is broken.” (Show less)