Economic Directorate
As economic Directors one by was the Federal Law of 4 April 1951 on the establishment of an Economic Board of the Federal Government institution founded Austrian social partnership referred, which represented an attempt at a formal integration of the power of big business associations of employers and employees in the system of government of the Second Republic. So it was a tripartite approach to juridification. The Economic Directorate, which included the Federal Chancellor and Vice Chancellor as well as the relevant specialist ministers and the heads of the social partner associations, had to deal with important and in some cases unpopular questions: on August 20, 1951, due to the prevailing meat shortage, it decided to introduce two meatless days of the week. (The shortage of meat was exacerbated by the butchers' refusal to pay the cattle dealers more than the official prices).
The economic directorate was repealed as unconstitutional in the following year due to the decision of the Constitutional Court ( VfSlg 2323/1952). In short, the Court argued as follows:
Section 3 (1) of the Foreign Trade Act from 1951 provided that the Federal Ministry for Trade and Reconstruction should issue permits in accordance with the resolutions of the Federal Government's Economic Directorate, "as long as it agrees with the report of the working committees of the Foreign Trade Advisory Council." bound by the decisions of these working committees. This would remove the constitutional right of the responsible federal minister to make resolutions and the resulting decision would only be formally presented as a decision of the minister, while in reality it is one of the working committee. This would turn the working committees into collegial authorities that are called upon to decide on a matter of the highest federal administration. The creation of such bodies by a simple federal law is incompatible with Article 69, Paragraph 1 of the Federal Constitutional Law . The same applies with regard to the economic directorate through lit. b resolution expressly reserved.
Regardless of this constitutional judgment, the Austrian social partnership and with it de facto the economic directorate continued to exist. However, instead of legalization, informal organization was chosen, as illustrated by the Joint Commission for Price and Wage Issues and its sub-committees founded in 1957 . The price-regulating claim of the large business associations, a legacy of the war and post-war period, was only slowly replaced by the free, competitive economy of the boom .
literature
- Emmerich Tálos : Social partnership: On the development and development dynamics of cooperative-concerted politics in Austria , pp. 41–83 in: Peter Gerlich / Edgar Grande / Wolfgang C. Müller (ed.): Social partnership in the crisis , Vienna 1985.
- Karl Acham , Wolfgang Norr, Bertram Schefold: Gains of Knowledge, Loss of Knowledge Vienna 1998. - Page 517
Individual evidence
- ↑ Federal Law Gazette No. 104/1951 of April 4, 1951 on the establishment of an economic directorate for the federal government
- ↑ See newspaper report from August 21, 1951