Unions and Industrial Democracy

This article concentrates on the role of unions in a system of industrial democracy, which is interpreted as labor participation in managerial decision making. The Western industrial world is confronted with two conceptions of the role of unions in the plant: one, characteristic of the great majority of U.S. unions and a substantial part of organized British labor, sees unions as countervailing power to management; the other, predominant on the European continent, wants labor to take its place in management and to participate in both the privileges and the responsibilities of decision making. This analysis is based on a comparison of the institutional arrange ments of West Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. In each of these countries, unions have a different role in industrial democracy. At one extreme unions operate at top managerial levels; at the other they function largely at the workshop level. These differences are further complicated by the danger of a cleavage between collective agreements concluded for an entire industry or other comprehensive unit and the reality that exists in the plant, a distinction to which the British Donovan Commission drew public attention. Moreover, efforts to combat wage-push inflation tend to concentrate union power at the top, while industrial democracy is more vital the closer to the plant level it operates.