Postwar West German firms justified welfare programs by workers’ loss of social belonging.

Evidence

The directors of the company have always seen caring for its employees as being part of their task, alongside coping with technological and business challenges. It was, and still is, not a question of having any romantic social ideas, but of how best to fulfil all the functions which the company, as an economic and social organization within the community, must perform. … We are faced in our factories today with young people from a generation uniquely marked by the experiences and demands of the war and the post-war period. We are faced with refugees from the eastern provinces who have often lost not only their homeland and their property but also their chosen profession. In every way, we are faced with people who are no longer certain of having a definite place in society and who therefore expect their factory to give them not merely bread and work, but also a way of belonging to the community … At no time has more depended on there being social peace within the factory and on employees enjoying their work and feeling a sense of belonging to the company. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 511

Categorization

• XREF: Dovetails with the Frankfurt School’s analysis of welfare-state paternalism and the ‘racket’ theory of compulsory belonging; Winkhaus reads as an industrial counterpart to Adorno on delegated happiness. — connects to: Postwar German workers expected their factory to provide social belonging, not just wages — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2082; West German postwar restoration followed an anti-welfare neoliberal programme; Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production. (+5 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postwar German workers expected their factory to provide social belonging, not just wages — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2082; West German postwar restoration followed an anti-welfare neoliberal programme; Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production. (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Many West German workers saw employer-employee relations as irreconcilable polarity. #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2101
• Most 1950s German workers saw employer relations as irreconcilable polarity #complicates (0.80)
• West German postwar restoration followed an anti-welfare neoliberal programme #complicates (0.78)
• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production #complicates (0.74) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185