GERMAN TRADE UNIONS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 79, Issue 7102, 2 September 1949, Page 5

GERMAN TRADE UNIONS

STEADY GROWTH REVEALED ATTENTION TO POLITICS Industrial relations, which were regulated along totalitaran lines by the Nazis, are now developing democratic forms in Western Germany under the tutelage of the Occupying powers. Trade unions and employers’s organisations destroyed by Hitler are rapidly taking their place again in the industrial life of the Western Zones, and their influence will increase as the new German Government takes over greater responsibility for interanl affairs, writes Professor J. Henry Richardson, of Leeds University, who recently visited Western Germany, in the Yorkshire Post. Already, at the beginning of April of this year, the number of trade unionists in the British Zone was 2,866,000, or about 40 per cent, of all workpeople in the zone. With the need to start afresh, there was need to adopt a unified structure in building up the new trade union movement, the industrial basis being adopted, without any craft unions or unions of general workers. The former division into Socialist Unions and Christian or Catholic Unions has not been resumed. In the British zone, the number of unions is only 15, all industrial which contrasts sharply with the hundreds of unions and the complex structure of the movement in Britain. In other Western zones, too, trade unionism has grown steadily, and in recent months much progress has been made in inter-zonal amalgamation of unions to bring about greater unity throughout Western Germany. The growth of employers’ organisations has been slower and less spectacular. Attention to Politics Wages in industries are no longer frozen. However, although money wages are low relatively to prices, the trad? unions seem at present to be thinking more of lower prices than of higher money wages. Weekly hours of work throughout the country are 48, and wages in terms of British currency range between £3 and £4 10s a week. Suspicion and distrust are rife between the unions and the employers’ organisations, and there is need for a jointly supported system of conciliation and arbitration.

The* trade unions are giving much of the attention to politics, under the leadership of the Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, the central organisation to which industrial unions are affiliated. There is a strong syndicalist bias in the unions. The workers already have substantial representation in the control of the coal industry, and the unions are making demands for a big share in the management of the steel industry, now in course of reoganisation.

The workers also demand throughout industry an equal part with employers in the engagement, dismissal, promotion, and transfer of workers, and a recognised share in the determination of production and trade policy. They join with other sections of German life in opposing any further demolition of munition plants.