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12 BzG-Supplement No. 1/2000 Richard Croucher Perhaps there was something of a missed opportunity here. If so, it could be interpreted as a small part of the wider opportunity unions missed to put their ideas for social reorganisation into effect in this period which has been suggested by some historians such as Michael Schneider. 18 Schneider felt that by the standards of the unions’ own pretensions and the mood of the population, initial instinct would lead one to accept that this was in fact the case. Yet he absolves the German unions from that charge in view of the context: they had to face occupying powers. Schneider argues that the British Labour Government may have been sympathetic to the unions’ plans, but they were neither willing nor able to defy the Americans to whom ideas of a ‘social state’ were quite alien. The argument is plausible, but was not tested at the time because the British did not attempt to persuade the Americans of the German union case. Nor were they lobbied to do so by the TUC. It has been suggested that the TUC did not support the German unions in their demands because of their subordination to the British Government. 19 In the case of the TUC’s rejection of Boeckler’s demand for one all-embracing union federation, McShane argues that this was related to the TUC’s view of the German character, since it stressed the German tendency ‘to blindly obey instructions from Headquarters’ 20 Yet these general explanations may be complemented by a quite particular one: Gottfurcht took the view at a critical stage in developments that Luce should not be challenged across a broad front. Gottfurcht’s exchange with Luce may have reflected his perception of TUC attitudes and policies towards, and links with, the British Government but is significant for its apparent consequences. The exchange certainly seems to have had the effect of making Gottfurcht less prone to criticise the Military Government, and may also have brought a corresponding increase in Luce’s confidence in his own views. After the debate, Gottfurcht’s reports to the TUC on the German situation became in general less critical of the Military Government’s activities. His report of May 1949, for instance, placed great emphasis on the question of Manpower Division’s Labour Advisors, who were being reduced and whose roles were being taken over by others, who had, he felt, shown their hostility to trade unions in the past. 21 In this sense, it confirmed his earlier views on the relatively positive attitudes of the Manpower Division. The later reports were more concerned to secure appropriate staffing of the occupation government than to criticise their policies. By the time that Gottfurcht resigned from his position as TUC-DGB liaison officer, Tewson agreed with Ludwig Rosenberg of the DGB that there was less need to carry on the liaison in the same way, even though he wished to carry on the ‘intimate’ relationship with the DGB. 22 Tewson wrote just over two years after the Gottfurcht-Luce exchange, but discussion in the interim had tended to shift in the general direction of trying to assist the German unions in their attempts to gain restitution of their pre1933 property, and away from
Richard Croucher BzG-Supplement No. 1/2000 13 the industrial relations matters raised earlier. 23 If Gottfurcht became less critical of the British as an occupying power then it was unsurprising if the TUC intervened rather less. Whether this was positive or negative from the German point of view is an interesting question the answer to which would largely depend on a judgement of the wider impact of TUC intervention which German historians would be better qualified to make. The general trend was perhaps inevitably in the general direction of less intervention as an increasing number of fundamental issues were resolved. From 1949, and the foundation of the DGB, TUC officials had in any case to take into account the fact that the Germans now had a national centre whose prerogatives had to be respected. It is therefore difficult to disentangle the impact of this particular discussion from the broader trend. However, a later incident is of interest in this connection, since it shows that even after the election of the Adenauer government, senior British officials in Germany felt that it was possible to request Tewson to intervene in support of German employers. It occurred in early 1952, during the crucial period of negotiation of the terms on which Mitbestimmung was to be conducted. The context had changed. Although occupying powers still played a role in the government of Germany, a German government had been elected in the West. The political situation became increasingly difficult for the unions as the Cold War intensified and their codetermination proposals were depicted as drawing on Soviet rather than German experience. By mid1950, there was deadlock on the DGB’s proposals and a campaign of industrial action began which was strongly resisted by the employers. Bipartite co-determination in the coal and steel industries was agreed by the spring of 1951, but in early 1952 the extension of this scheme to the economy as a whole was still under discussion. The tenor of parliamentary discussion on both the coal and steel and the wider arrangements led the DGB, now led by Christian Fette, to fear that the government and employers were strongly opposed to extending the bi-partite arrangements. At this time, German trade unions were represented on an Anglo-American Joint Productivity Council whose aim was to raise productivity in the two occupying powers’ zones in Germany. In March 1952, Herr Stork of the Verband der Deutschen Industrie based in Frankfurt visited Sir Thomas Hutton, a British member of the Productivity Council. According to Hutton, Stork told him that the unions were unwilling to participate in a programme of productivity teams unless their demands for codetermination were accepted. Hutton encouraged him to talk to Tewson or someone else in the TUC. Hutton wrote to Tewson: ‘It occurs to me that you might feel it desirable to use your international contacts to resolve this difficulty’. 24 Tewson replied that ‘This is one of those matters in which it is very difficult to interfere in other people’s business’, but he hoped to be seeing Fette in Brussels in the following week and ‘I will try to make an opportunity to see how matters stand’. 25 As his earlier reply implied,
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