An Experiment in Economic Democracy

In the aftermath of the First World War, construction workers across Europe began to establish local networks of democratically governed building companies that sought to implement two of organized labour’s most urgent demands: affordable housing and democratic control of production. This book offers the first detailed analysis of these networks that came to be known as building guilds. Focusing on interwar Britain and Weimar Germany, it reveals the profoundly transnational–and hitherto strikingly overlooked–impact of guild socialist ideas, which had originated in late-Edwardian England, on trade unions and socialist politics. The book thus sheds light on a remarkable real-life experiment in workplace democracy that, despite its enormous popularity at the time, has been largely forgotten. Drawing on a diversity of sources that range from company reports to work instructions and written responses by employees, it shows that the building guilds deserve to be rediscovered. In their efforts to strike a balance between democratic participation and economic efficiency, the building guilds experimented with innovative approaches to the organization of work that resurfaced half a century later in the 1970s movements for workers’ control and the humanization of work, and that continue to influence debates about industrial and economic democracy today.