General Commission of the Trade Unions of Germany

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The general commission of the trade unions in Germany was from 1890 to 1919 the general body of the individual associations of free trade unions and as such acted as the central management instance .

The general commission was founded in November 1890 after the repeal of the Socialist Act at a free trade union conference of functionaries in Berlin as a supra-union coordination and agitation body. In the following years, parallel to the development of the free trade unions into a mass organization, it developed more and more areas of competence within the social democratic labor movement. In 1899 it was given bindingly delimited areas of responsibility in an organizational statute for the first time; in 1906, the Mannheim Agreement recognized it for the first time by the SPD as a management body of the labor movement with equal rights alongside the party leadership and treated as the central political authority of the trade union movement. The general leadership role of the General Commission as a whole solidified until the beginning of the First World War , which was tacitly accepted by the individual trade union associations. From 1891, her journalistic tasks included the publication of the Correspondenzblatt as the central organ of the trade unions. Further areas of responsibility included agitation as well as statistical recording and documentation of the situation of the workforce. It maintained a central workers' secretariat, implemented the resolutions of the trade union congresses and finally represented the trade union movement at the political level. In 1908 the number of members was increased from seven to 13.

At the beginning of the First World War, the decision was made to join the national united front of the truce before the Reichstag faction of the SPD . The General Commission maintained this policy throughout the war and during that time developed into the decisive decision-making body that determined the policies and actions of the free trade unions during the war.

At the end of the war and during the November Revolution of 1918, the decision was made to form an alliance with the entrepreneurs in the Central Working Group and against revolutionary experiments. The General Commission thus played a decisive role in the continued existence of the existing economic order.

At the first post-war congress of the free trade unions in Nuremberg in 1919 , the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) was the organizational successor to the General Commission. The Federal Board of Directors of the ADGB as the direct successor to the General Commission showed an astonishing personal continuity to the pre-war period. The work of the General Commission was particularly shaped by the work of its long-time chairman Carl Legien .

literature

  • Klaus Schönhoven : Expansion and Concentration. Studies on the development of the free trade unions in Wilhelminian Germany from 1890 to 1914. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-915170-2 ( Industrielle Welt 30).