Neoliberals favored friendly unions but strictly limited their power over investment decisions

Evidence

On the fundamental level, a more “friendly” attitude to the unions appeared to be a timely and judicious means to reinforce moderate labor leaders as against their comrades who wanted to radicalize workers’ organizations. Educating those open to persuasion concerning the tenets of a free market society would be the preliminary perquisite of the neoliberal program. Once they were sufficiently indoctrinated, the next level would be to usher them into the antechambers of the conduct of enterprise. Nonetheless, their participation in the structures of management was understood as harboring all manner of dangers. Economically speaking, their interventions could disturb business investment—and thus, earnings—by substituting political criteria (maintaining employment, employee purchase power, etc.) for economic rationality. It would be easy to portray union participation as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with the tendency to misallocation of resources inside the enterprise becoming a threat to the entire price system. Thus, it was taken as a necessary corollary that labor’s participation in management had to be limited to social and personnel matters. Above all, safeguards would have to be in place to restrain their presence where their voices could disturb investment choice. All of these ideas, far from being purely theoretical abstractions, formed the ideological basis of the German employer associations’ discourses on co-determination in postwar Germany and during the 1950s. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 965

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to other scholarship on neoliberal co-optation of workers’ organizations and the German co-determination debates; parallels work on how social-democratic reforms were later weaponized against unions. — connects to: French trade union leaders joined neoliberal circles to fight communist influence — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 282; Neoliberal ideas reframed anti-union business positions as good judgment rather than reactionary politics — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1474; Neoliberal union critique reframed labor organization as monopoly power backed by coercion. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 971 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘friendly to unions’ strategies served to discipline and educate labor rather than empower it — the soft-power precursor to Weimar-era corporatist incorporation.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal union critique reframed labor organization as monopoly power backed by coercion. #corroborates (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 971
• Neoliberal ideas reframed anti-union business positions as good judgment rather than reactionary politics #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1474