Abstract
This article offers a fresh perspective on shop floor power in postwar Europe. The historiography of the “golden age of social democracy” has identified two sets of opportunities that enabled workers to improve their lot at the plant level. The first revolves around direct worker participation in the postwar settlement, both through elected shop floor bodies and through the intermediary of trade unions and mass political parties. The second revolves around the social and geographical mobility of workers, linked to both widening career and educational opportunities and postwar industrialization and urbanization. The forces of participation and mobility are usually seen to have operated in tandem; that is, the spoils of worker participation in socioeconomic and political decision-making facilitated their social and geographical mobility and vice versa. This article challenges the assumption of mechanical links between participation and mobility. It aims to demonstrate that skilled workers and trade unionists often exploited the opportunities offered by participation to curtail social and geographical mobility. To this end, it takes a pan-European approach, bringing together the shop floor history of the communist East and the capitalist West. This enables the author to show that immobility was a feature, rather than a bug, of postwar worker participation.
