Working group partnership in business

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The Working Group Partnership in Business e. V. ( AGP ) is a nationwide association that advocates the spread of the concept of employee participation in Germany. The non-profit association founded in 1950 brings together member companies that practice employee equity participation and contractually agreed participation and co-decision models, as well as individual members (e.g. scientists, technical experts and HR managers). The main tasks of the AGP are to support its members in the introduction and further development of their participation model, in disseminating the concept of employee participation to the public, in the organization of specialist seminars, conferences and expert discussions, in advising associations and politicians on improving the Framework conditions and in the maintenance of national and international cooperation. The office is located in Kassel , which is also where the association is based.

founding

On October 13, 1950, a group of entrepreneurs in Altenberg / Rhineland founded the Working Group for the Promotion of Partnership in Business. V., which quickly attracted public attention and above all in medium-sized businesses as well as employers and workers' associations. The initiative to found the company went back to the textile manufacturer Gert P. Spindler , who was born in Hilden near Düsseldorf in 1914 and went to school there. After two years of professional training in Switzerland and England, he headed the multi-level textile company Paul-Spindler-Werke KG for thirty years as the fourth generation of his family's managing partner in the Rhineland . During the Second World War he was used as an officer in the economic administration of Russia. In the post-war years, he developed and practiced the employee co-entrepreneurship concept as a form of business partnership in the family business that was taken over. In addition to and after his entrepreneurship, Spindler was a communications consultant for industry for two decades. In addition, he was the publisher and editor of the weekly newspaper Der Progress for four years after the Second World War . Spindler has reported in detail in several books about his experiences with the operational partnership in the company he runs. He pointed out that the Co-partnership Association , which the Quakers founded in Great Britain in 1886 and which held annual conferences in Oxford and Cambridge, had inspired him to found the AGP . With these impulses from his stays in England, Spindler felt compelled to win over a group of predominantly medium-sized entrepreneurs in Germany for his project to found the AGP. The founding documents of the Hilden / Rhld District Court. list the following individuals as founding members:

  • C. Donald MacLean of Coll
  • Guido Fischer
  • Walter Hain
  • Bruno Herrmann
  • Ferdinand Kampschulte
  • Mr. Meyer
  • Klaus Schraepler
  • Ernst W. Slanina
  • Gert P. Spindler
  • Robert Völker
  • Jochen Wistinghausen
  • August Theodor Wuppermann

In the founding statute, which was unanimously adopted, they gave the AGP its name in § 1 and described its task as follows: “The association is called 'Working Group for the Promotion of Partnership in Business'. The working group has the task:

a) To develop forms of business partnership and to promote their implementation in the companies of all branches of the economy as well as to strive for a profit sharing determined according to the performance and the participation of all creators in the important decisions of the business activities;
b) to promote and implement cooperation and the exchange of experience between companies;
c) to participate in the internal and external balancing of the contradictions between the social and performance partners, in particular also the employee and entrepreneurial organizations , through advice and expert opinions and as an arbitration board ;
d) to give the legislative bodies suggestions in the social and economic policy area . "

Historical background

Spindler's initiatives for the co-entrepreneur concept in his own company and for the founding of the AGP were by no means only approved in the 1950s; many suspected these efforts to search for new ways, a " third way between capitalism and socialism ". This gives an indication of the previous experience and the intentions of the initiators for founding the AGP after the Second World War. The industrialization was in Germany especially in the second half of the 19th century by continuing and intensifying conflicts between capitalism and liberalism accompanied on the one hand and socialism and Marxism on the other. Up to the first decades of the 20th century, the class struggle not only burdened the economy; society as a whole and the state suffered considerably from the class-struggle controversies. For the concept of company partnership, which was later developed, it is important that at the end of the 19th century, the first signs of a transition from the predominant patriarchal to a cooperative management style appeared in some industrial companies ; some initiators for this change in the interpersonal behavior of the people in the factories called their management concept - based on the constitution of the German Reich at the time - as a "constitutional factory". Even after the First World War (1914–1918), challenges arose which decades later stimulated the initiators of the concept of partnership in business to search for new paths. These include the large private financial losses in the inflation (1923) and the extent of unemployment in the Great Depression (1929), which have tightened until the collapse of the German Reich in 1933, the class war conflicts in the economy and in politics. Then came the submission of the economy and companies to the dictates of the party ( NSDAP ) and the state, combined with the preparation for the military and war economy.

Already before and especially during and immediately after the Second World War, there was a clear reduction in the confrontation between labor and capital in many companies. A prosperous and often extremely positive cooperation between employers and employees, between company management, executives, employees and employee representatives increasingly replaced the previous class struggle. This internal cooperation was essential in the effects of the war (especially in the Allied air raids from 1942/43), in the elimination of the war damage and in the reconstruction after the end of the war from 1945. Just a few years later, class struggle mentalities revived in parts of the German economy. At the end of the 1940s there were new confrontations in business, society and politics. Among other things, they became particularly visible in the disputes about the demand for a statutory regulation of co-determination for employees and trade unions in the economy and in companies. The founders of the AGP found themselves in this only roughly sketched historical context in October 1950. The historical past and their own experiences shaped their intentions, which they recorded in the founding statutes of the AGP.

Goals in its creation

The developments in the world of work since the beginning of industrialization and the situation in the late 1940s make it understandable that in autumn 1950 the founders wanted above all to overcome the class struggle relics of the past in the economy and in companies. For a long time the AGP repeated the motto “partnership instead of class struggle” in its leaflets and other publications. The emerging East-West conflict in Europe and the beginning of the Cold War in politics encouraged some of the initiators of the AGP to seek a “third path between capitalism and socialism” (Spindler) and to develop it in their companies. The knowledge gained in this way was then intended to provide orientation for the economy and businesses in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) or in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the event of a hoped-for reunification in Germany. The dominant motives of the AGP founders were the safeguarding of industrial peace in the factories and in society in West Germany, which they widely regarded as an essential component of the so-called economic miracle after the lost Second World War. With this in mind, the AGP they founded and the companies affiliated with it should promote and sustainably maintain cooperation between work, social and collective bargaining partners. The respect for the human dignity of all those working in the companies aimed at reducing the object position of people in the company performance process. In these intentions of the founders to develop the subject position of the employees in the company as much as possible, one can see an early approach for a movement in the German economy that was called "humanization of work" about twenty years later, a term that the AGP initiators not yet used. The reactions to the founding of the AGP and to its rapidly developing activities were mixed. Controversies about the concept of corporate partnership found expression in some media. The AGP and some of the partnership firms were fairly widespread against opposition from employers' associations and unions. Sharp polemics also came from some entrepreneurs against the partnership concept and against some of its representatives. On the other hand, the number of companies that were interested in the ideas of the AGP and that began to practice corporate management based on partnership beyond the group of founders gradually grew. As early as the 1950s, the AGP found approval and support from some media and scholars as well as from respected representatives of Christian churches and representatives of Catholic social teaching. The evangelical bishop Hanns Lilje and the social scientist Oswald von Nell-Breuning SJ should be remembered by name.

Work of the AGP

In the sixties and seventies, the association repeatedly commented on the major economic and social reform concepts in Germany and made suggestions: on works constitution, co-determination, wealth creation, collective bargaining policy and social security. The association was active in the discussion about employee equity participation and accompanied the various legal measures to improve the legal and tax framework for employee participation in the capital of the employing company. In the process of privatizing East German companies after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the association actively campaigned for employees to participate in the transformation of the formerly state-owned companies and combines. In the course of the increasingly accelerating dynamics of the economic process and the emergence of new management and leadership techniques as well as new forms of work organization and employee motivation, the focus was on the company itself, its corporate culture and its management systems at the latest in the 1980s . For example, based on the experience, concepts and instruments of its member companies, the association has repeatedly pointed out the connection between - material and immaterial - employee participation and corporate success and has proven this through best practice examples as well as scientific studies.

Today the concept of employee participation is more topical than ever, because an employee equity participation can still improve the financial resources of companies and their cost flexibility in the long term. Both of these had proven to be a stabilizing factor for companies and employees, especially during the economic crisis of 2008. In addition, there are positive effects with regard to the general performance and innovative strength of companies, which is becoming increasingly important in view of international competition. And finally, in times of demographic change and the associated shortage of skilled workers, employee participation is becoming increasingly important as a component of contemporary personnel and corporate management, especially for small and medium-sized companies. As part of its public relations work, the association tries to emphasize the importance of employee participation, especially for small and medium-sized companies, and to promote better political framework conditions. For the latter, she is also active on a European level in various organizations and bodies, such as the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership in Brussels or the International Association for Financial Participation in Paris / Brussels.

Promoters in Six Decades

CEO

The number of those responsible for the development of the association as well as for the development and dissemination of the concept of partnership management begins with the members of the entrepreneurial group who founded the AGP on the initiative of Gert P. Spindler in 1950 and elected him as its first chairman. He has now been followed by thirteen CEOs of the AGP.

  • 1950–1969 Gert P. Spindler
  • 1969–1973 Ernst Sachs
  • 1974–1977 Emil Lux
  • 1978–1982 Christian Dräger
  • 1982–1984 Claus Zoellner
  • 1984–1988 Uwe Schäkel
  • 1988–1992 Dieter Weidemann
  • 1992–1994 Carsten Meyer
  • 1994–1999 Jörg Knoblauch
  • 1999–2003 Gerhard Schuler
  • 2003-2005 Wolfgang Wulfmeyer
  • 2005–2011 Horst Kuschetzki
  • 2011–2016 Walter Ernst
  • since 2016 Paul Reuter

executive Director

Since it was founded, three full-time managing directors have been responsible for managing the office as well as for operational tasks:

  • 1950–1971 Rudolf von Knüpffer
  • 1971–2007 Michael Lezius
  • since 2007 Heinrich Beyer

In addition to managing the offices, the managing director's tasks essentially consist of looking after the member companies, consolidating and expanding the circle of members, maintaining the media, politics and lawmakers as well as publishing his own specialist articles.

scientist

Scientists have also been important promoters since it was founded. They have contributed to the fact that meanwhile a barely manageable number of relevant publications has given the partnership efforts of the AGP - in addition to the publications originating from experts in participation practice - again and again new impulses, which are reflected in the activities of the AGP and in particular at AGP events to have.

In the early phase, the following professors contributed in particular to the scientific foundation of the partnership concept: in business administration Guido Fischer ( University of Munich ), in economics Carl Föhl ( Freie Universität Berlin / management of Groz-Beckert KG in Ebingen), in labor law Hans Galperin (Landesarbeitsgericht Bremen ) and the German-American Robert S. Hartman. From these and other scientists, as well as from younger university professors in the next generation, the German partnership companies received mostly positive and constructive support, which was theoretically sound and practice-oriented.

Eduard Gaugler , Kurt Maier and Rolf Wunderer were among the younger generation of scientists who worked on the association's partnership concept after the first generation of promoters . In a comprehensive dissertation at the University of Munich, Maier had analyzed the relationship between employee participation and corporate partnership with Guido Fischer before he later took on a professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich and worked part-time as a management consultant for the Spreading corporate partnership in business committed. Wunderer also had a doctorate from Fischer. In his academic career at the universities in Essen and in particular in St. Gallen, he has made a significant contribution to the development of the co-entrepreneur concept in connection with the principles of corporate management based on partnership.

Beyond the circle of those named here, from around the mid-1960s onwards, more and more scientists in various disciplines at universities in German-speaking countries have dealt with the partnership concept and its components. This group of university professors, who can be assigned to a third generation with regard to the development of the partnership concept and thus also to the AGP itself, includes in particular Hans Schneider (Nuremberg University of Applied Sciences), who, as the editor and author of numerous publications, discusses the corporate partnership and its dissemination in Germany Has promoted the economy intensively. Even Walter A. Oechsler , since 1996 from Eduard Gaugler at the University of Mannheim on the oldest Department of Human Resources in the German-speaking countries, has dealt with cooperative participation schemes and participated in the award of partnership enterprises by AGP with the so-called AGP Stars.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kassel Register of Associations, No. VR 1607.
  2. ^ Eduard Gaugler : Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 1 ff.
  3. ^ Eduard Gaugler: Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 3 ff.
  4. ^ Eduard Gaugler: Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 6 ff.
  5. ↑ AGP e. V .: Employee participation - management concept for medium-sized companies. Kassel 2011, p. 31.
  6. ^ Eduard Gaugler: Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 14 ff.
  7. ^ Eduard Gaugler: Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 19 ff.
  8. ^ Eduard Gaugler: Partnership in business and business - sixty years of AGP -. In: FBS series of publications. Volume 67. Mannheim 2011, p. 20 ff.