Yellow Union
Yellow unions or yellow organizations are often ordoliberal oriented unions . They turn against the socialist or social-democratic ideas represented by the “red unions” . They represented an association of workers who oppose the union struggle , appear business-friendly, strive for a friendly relationship with the employers and are supported by them morally and financially. In works councils they refrain from making full use of the legally possible options for action.
history
The first yellow union is believed to have emerged in France during a strike in the Creusot iron mills in 1899 as a countermovement to the syndicalist red unions, which at the time dominated the French labor movement .
There are various explanations for the name; possibly it goes back to the yellow tassel that the first yellow unions used as a symbol. Another assumption is based on the fact that the associations in Paris covered the windows of their association houses with yellow paper in order to differentiate themselves from the socialist associations that used red paper. On the one hand, the emergence of yellow unions in various French factories seems to reflect an authentic resistance, especially by Catholic workers, to syndicalism and the constant strikes , on the other hand, the employers very quickly took advantage of the idea and used the yellow union for their own purposes a.
Under the leadership of Pierre Biétry , a former supporter of the syndicalist CGT , an attempt was made between 1900 and 1910 to transform the yellow unions organized in various large companies into a political movement. A core idea of this movement was the participation of the workers in company profits and the peaceful cooperation of labor and capital. At the same time, the movement of the New Right formed after the Dreyfus Affair and conservative Catholicism was close and represented many anti-Semitic ideas that were disseminated in the members' magazine Le Jaune ( The Yellow ). But Biétry's umbrella organization of the yellow trade unions could not gain a permanent foothold among the workers and disappeared from the political scene around 1910.
In Germany, the first yellow trade unions were founded around 1905, for example at Siemens or among metal workers in Augsburg. Shortly after the end of the First World War, the German employers' associations at the time committed themselves in the Stinnes-Legien Agreement to end their previous support for the yellow unions and to recognize the “red unions” as collective bargaining partners for the first time. To this day there have been repeated attempts to establish yellow unions, for example the AUB or the GNBZ , with which the private postal industry tries to avert the minimum wage in the mail delivery industry .
In Austria, the independent trade union deserves special mention, which was organized from 1928 mainly in the companies of the Austrian Alpine Mining Society and was close to the German national anti-democratic Styrian Homeland Security .
See also
literature
- Walter Göhring: The yellow trade unions in Austria in the interwar period . Vienna, 1998. ISBN 3-7035-0682-2
- Günther Schulz : The employees since the 19th century . Munich 2000.
- Hans Speier: The Employees Before National Socialism - A Contribution to Understanding the German Social Structure 1918–1933 . Göttingen 1977.