Workers' Control

WORKERS’ CONTROL. One of several terms, workers’ control expresses the idea that workers should make, or at least take part in making, the decisions that affect their working lives. “Self-management” and “anarcho-syndicalism” are more or less synonyms. Not so, “participatory democracy” in a workplace setting, which better describes management-initiated schemes to co-opt workers by giving them only the appearance of a voice in decisions.

In Europe, workers’ control has both Marxist and anarchist antecedents. Marx wrote about Selbsttätigkeit, or self-activity, and declared that the emancipation of the working class would be the task of workers themselves. In his pamphlet about the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx envisioned a future society in which ordinary workers would govern through public bodies that were legislative and executive at the same time. Russian Marxists Leon Trotsky and Alexandra Kollontai in certain periods of their lives employed the Russian word samodeyatelnost, which also means self-activity, to articulate a critique of what they considered the over-centralized and undemocratic character of Leninism and the Bolshevik Party. Anarchists, meantime, not only talked about workers’ self-government but repeatedly sought to create producers’ cooperatives.

During the first quarter of the twentieth century, widespread enthusiasm about workers’ control percolated throughout Europe. In Great Britain, G. D. H. Cole developed the idea of “guild socialism,” and during World War I shop stewards exercised significant control over decisions even about such matters as whether a worker had been wrongly drafted! In Russia, workers created bodies representative of all workers in a given locality during both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions: in form little different from the central labor union commonplace in other countries, but with atypically radical politics, these bodies came to be known as “Soviets.” In Italy, workers seized factories at the end of World War I, and in Spain anarchists laid the basis for the astonishing efflorescence of worker and peasant self-management during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. All over Europe there was excitement among workers about the idea of a general strike that would put an end to capitalism and at the same time empower workers to run the society that would come after capitalism.

Workers’ control in the United States developed along both practical and theoretical lines. Historian David Montgomery has described the substantial real autonomy of nineteenth-century craftsmen, whose skills enabled them to impose remarkably broad workplace regulations on those who provided capital. At the time, Daniel De Leon set forth a vision of industrial unions whereby unskilled workers would create the new society “within the shell of the old.”

De Leon participated in the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905. The IWW’s preamble declared that capitalism could be overthrown “only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries, if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one and injury to all.... The army of production must be organized, not only for the everyday struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of a new society within the shell of the old.”

Historian Paul Buhle has shown the extent to which De Leon’s syndicalism was carried into the IWW by ex-members of De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party (SLP) such as Justus Ebert, Ben Williams, and Frank Bohn. Wobbly strikes of 1909–1917, like the famous “bread and roses” strike of Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers in 1912, continually raised philosophical questions of workers’ control through propagandistic stress upon workers’ creation of all use-value.

The workers’ control idea spread far beyond radical groups like the SLP and IWW. Frederick Taylor and his disciples were developing practices such as the timing of each work operation and the assembly line to break the traditional control of craft workers over their conditions of work. During World War I the general shortage of labor put skilled workers in an especially favorable position to press their demands. As a result of these negative and positive causes, “control strikes” in trades like the machinists flourished in 1916–1920 and the term “workers’ control” first came into wide usage. During and just after World War I, moreover, substantial American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions like the railroad workers and miners also demanded workers’ control in the broader sense of government ownership of the means of production. Outside of the AFL, the vigorous Amalgamated Clothing Workers union members and leaders discussed the ongoing efforts to regulate production from the shop floor and what this effort might mean for the future of industrial democracy.

Variegated expressions of workers’ control flourished in the early 1930s. The badly weakened national unions had become timid. Favorable government legislation had not yet been passed. Accordingly, workers turned to their shop mates and to other workers in the same locality for a series of dramatic direct actions, including general strikes (Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco in 1934), departmental sit-downs (rubber plants in Akron), and even plant occupations (the Independent Union of All Workers in Minnesota). At a local level, some Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions also acted in this manner for a few years. They set up extensive steward systems, stopped work to resolve grievances, and in a few situations, like Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana, successfully enforced their demands without a written collective bargaining agreement. Workers also formed independent labor parties in many cities. One such party came to power in Berlin, New Hampshire, and a resolution favoring a labor party very nearly passed at the 1935 AFL convention. Ironically, the much more radical CIO pulled most of the supporters of a labor party into the arms of the Democrats.

Bureaucratization of the new CIO unions proceeded very rapidly during World War II. By the end of the war, the dues check-off, replacing opposed to voluntary dues payments); the union shop, obliging all new workers to join the union; mandatory use of a grievance procedure culminating in binding arbitration rather than direct action on the shop floor; and no-strike and management prerogative clauses in collective bargaining agreements, had all become typical. Nonetheless, the wartime labor shortage combined with the CIO’s acceptance of a wage freeze led to a wave of strikes, whether authorized among coal miners or unauthorized “wildcats” in unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW).

A resurgence of interest in workers’ control took shape at the end of the 1960s. Theorists associated with this development included C. L. R. James and Paul Mattick in the United States, or Serge Mallet and André Gorz in France, in turn invoked the names of older Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek. The Institute for Workers’ Control in Great Britain published a stream of pamphlets. In the United States, the journal Radical America during the decade 1967–1977 provided a forum for writers on workers’ control like George Rawick, Jeremy Brecher, and Stan Weir.

Events seemed to justify this revived interest. Student strikes in France in 1968 were to some extent joined by workers. In 1956 in Hungary, and later, in Polish Solidarity, workers showed a capacity for self-organization outside all existing institutions that astonished the world. A strong current of direct action expressed itself in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States, for example in the work of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit and in the “schmozzle,” in-plant slowdowns and the like, at the new General Motors assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

This revival of workers’ control proved short-lived. Thanks to the Vietnam War and the booming economy, the late 1960s had once again offered a time when the demand for labor was strong and rank-and-file workers could be emboldened to take direct action. Beginning in the early 1970s, a long-term recessionary trend arrived. By the mid-1990s, workers earned 20 percent less in real wages than they had two decades earlier. Plant shutdowns, downsizing, and disinvestment became the norm throughout the United States economy. Frightened and often looking forward to retirement, workers became less active. Glenn Perusek suggests that dissent in the American labor movement turned in the 1970s-1980s toward electoral activity instead of direct action, with precious little success.

The idea of workers’ control nevertheless persisted in various forms. Scattered sectors of successful union organizing, often among women, as at Yale and Harvard Universities, gathered support from workers most concerned with questions of dignity and job status. These actions effectively utilized the horizontal, one-on-one style of organizing typical of the workers’ control tradition. Plant shutdowns, the workers’ worst nightmare, have also inspired vigorous resistance, sometimes accompanied by direct action.

The partially successful miners’ strike against the Pittston Coal Company in 1989 featured a three-day occupation of the Moss 3 coal preparation plant. Likewise, workers at UAW plants in the Southwest and at the A. E. Staley plant in Decatur, Illinois, returned to the old Wobbly idea of an “in-plant strategy.” The historic tactic of “working to rule,” carrying out the foremen’s orders literally, no matter how ridiculous they may be or how much damage to the pace of production they produce, remains an option, as do other forms of action on the job more likely to elicit workers’ participation than an outside strike in an era when companies do not hesitate to replace strikers permanently.

In early 2012, some sixty-five members of United Electrical Workers began a sit-down strike at Serious Materials (originally Republic Windows and Doors) in Chicago, after learning that the company intended to close the factory and move operations to Colorado and Pennsylvania. This action, successful in a single day, followed in three years by another strike at the same plant, and the subsequent change in ownership, but the latest outcome was different. The president of the union local announced, after the new owners agreed to keep the factory open for ninety days, that the workers would form a cooperative and operate the factory themselves. The cooperative took the title of New Era Windows.

Workers’ control, long absent as a slogan, remained an idea behind resilient labor idealism.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States. New York: Verso, 2013 edition.

Fritz, Don, and David Roediger, eds. Within the Shell of the Old: Essays on Workers’ Self-Organization. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990.

Montgomery, David. Workers’ Control in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Perusek, Glenn, and Kent Worcester, eds. Trade Union Politics: American Unions and Economic Change, 1960s–1990s. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers’ Movements. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Books, 1975.
“Workers as Owners.” Labor Research Review (spring 1985).