Programme

In 1974, the United Autoworkers Union (UAW) selected six Detroit autoworkers of diverse backgrounds for a unique experiment funded by the Ford Foundation. Supervised by Arthur Weinberg of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the two women and four men traveled to Sweden to examine the latest efforts there to make working on the auto assembly line more meaningful and satisfying again. At the time, autowork—the embodiment of postwar prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic—was in a deep crisis. Many felt that automation and the accompanying miniaturization and policing of jobs through foremen and union officials alike had gone too far. As a result, a growing number of American and European autoworkers suffered from what commentators called the “blue-collar blues”; they were beset by work-related feelings of social alienation, frustration, and political disillusionment which often expressed themselves through self-destructive behaviors and violence in and beyond the workplace. Spurred on by the 1972 Lordstown Strike at General Motors, Americans started to look at Swedish auto companies like Saab-Scania as paragons for how to address the crisis of autowork. (Show less)

Against the backdrop of rising authoritarianism and in times of social and economic crisis, social psychology constituted itself during the 1930s in the US as a discipline devoted to “resolving social problems” (Lewin, 1948) and reinforcing democratic values and institutions through a specific democratic social engineering (Graebner, 1986). As a means of socio-technical intervention and social reconstruction this true „science of democracy“ (Rose, 1996) gained special relevance in the workplace. From the 1920s on, experiments were conducted in the factory, starting with Elton Mayo’s notorious Hawthorne studies that discovered the productive effects of harmonious human interrelations. In the 1930s, Kurt Lewin followed the lead in his groundbreaking ‘democracy experiments’ (Lewin, 1939; Lippitt, 1938 and 1940), which for the first time investigated indirect and participatory – “democratic” – mechanisms of governing groups. By setting up democratic atmospheres in experimental groups they showed that democratic leadership was superior to its authoritarian counterpart: It proved to be more satisfactory for the experimental subjects and more efficient in terms of their work products. (Show less)

This paper will investigate the contested history of two forms of industrial democracy on the
Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) during the late 1920s and 1930s. It will be shown
how the specific form of industrial democracy, that finally emerged, evolved out of a
contentious process, with the question of legitimate representation of worker’s interests as its focal point. In this process, the conflicting interests of company, state and workers and their role in shaping industrial democracy on the railways in British-India become discernable. (Show less)

Labour and business historians have often remarked the importance of the “dualism of power” as a key feature in the history of Italy’s largest private firm, Fiat, throughout the 20th century. This paper will analyse the experience of workers’ control at Fiat after World War II by focusing on two fields, thanks to previously unexplored archival sources: corporate welfare and the surveillance system.
Conceiving of them as the carrot and the stick of corporate management implies understanding them as distinct, but deeply interrelated, fields: we argue that both were parts of a unitary hierarchical
system, made of social control and paternalism as well as the cult of productivity. During the war, as this dialectic was carried to the extreme, it was directly challenged by the workers’ growing unrest.
With the liberation of Turin in 1945, as the Fiat top management was under trial for its collaboration with Fascism and there was talk of nationalisation, workers and partisans took control of the Fiat factories and assumed responsibility in these fields. Battista Santhià, a communist and former
member of Gramsci’s Ordine Nuovo, was put in charge of social services, Mario Tarallo - linked to the liberal-socialist Action Party - of surveillance. In the postwar context, as it was not yet possible to restart production as usual, this meant using the factory as a presidium for answering to the first needs of the population (hence the even greater importance of social services), experimenting new forms of democracy, and displaying democratic and workers’ power. Eventually, the struggle was
lost. The purge of the most active workers and partisan leaders, the abolition of the Consigli di gestione, and the restoration of the old management’s full authority culminated in Santhià’s ousting in 1952. (Show less)