Early MPS figures endorsed labor participation in business as a counterweight to state intervention
Evidence
Albert Hunold was not as reluctant as Hensel to appeal to a kind of solidarity (even he would never use such terminology) between employers and employees. During 1949, Hunold served as the MPS secretary and its main fundraiser, but he had also enjoyed close connections with Swiss elites since the 1930s. With regard to European social policy, Hunold was tireless in denouncing increasing state intervention, particularly in Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland. Yet when it came to the issue of trade unions, he described as legitimate two different types of formal combination between employers and unions in social policy: the first one at the industrial level (community of trade), the second at the firm level (community of enterprise). In both cases, he believed that these combinations would tend to encourage and reinforce labor participation in the conduct of business. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 961
Categorization
- XREF: Complicates the standard picture of early neoliberals as uniformly anti-union; connects to wider historiography of how MPS figures pragmatically reconciled market liberalism with corporatist arrangements, as in Mirowski and Plehwe’s Road From Mont Pèlerin. — connects to: Early ordoliberal sympathy for unions disappeared from later MPS views — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 977; Ordoliberals sought to regulate labor-capital conflict at the enterprise level — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 960
Broader Connections
- Early ordoliberal sympathy for unions disappeared from later MPS views
#corroborates(0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 977 - Ordoliberals sought to regulate labor-capital conflict at the enterprise level
#expands(0.80) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 960