Workers' Direct Participation in Decisions in Hungarian Factories Available to Purchase

For the past few years workers' participation in decisions associated with the running of factories has become a much discussed question in Hungarian industrial relations. Shopfloor democracy, however, is much more than a fashionable topic for discussion in industry, science or politics. It is a real social problem waiting for a solution. Workers' participation has emerged as an outcome of a number of recent industrial and socio‐economic advances which have had a major impact on our working class, and on industrial and social processes in our country. This progress has made us question many traditional approaches to the motivation of workers and encouraged us to look for new solutions. One of these is the promotion of the direct participation of workers in shopfloor decisions. Although indirect workers' participation, e.g. through trade union representatives, is of the utmost importance in Hungary and well deserves attention, it cannot be discussed within the compass of the present article, which will be strictly limited to the question of direct participation.