The Building Guilds of Interwar Europe: An Experiment in Economic Democracy

Project Information

ECODEM

Grant agreement ID: 101103025

DOI

10.3030/101103025

Project closed

EC signature date 24 April 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 September 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 189 687,36

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT BERLIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ECODEM (The Building Guilds of Interwar Europe: An Experiment in Economic Democracy)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the aftermath of the First World War, European cities witnessed a massive expansion of producer cooperatives in the building sector. Drawing on ideas for industrial reform that were shared widely across borders, these producer cooperatives, or building guilds, not only aimed to improve urban housing but also to democratize the construction industries and society more broadly. Building guilds were owned and governed by trade unions, and employees participated in managerial and directorial decision-making. The building guilds of interwar Europe thus launched one of the most striking experiments in economic democracy in the early twentieth century. Local guilds quickly merged into national associations that promoted distinct models of collective decision-making and shared ownership. By the early 1920s, European-wide federations had started to distribute information and organize exchange between building guilds that stretched the entire continent. Despite their rapid growth and initial success, however, the building guilds of interwar Europe have been virtually forgotten. ECODEM offers the first comprehensive historical analysis of this transnational movement. Focusing on Germany and Great Britain, the action had the following three objectives. First, it set out to reveal the democratization measures that were implemented to improve participation on the shop floor, at the work site, and in management. Second, ECODEM intended to investigate under what conditions employees accepted measures that aimed at making work more efficient, even where those measures had negative consequences for labor. Third, ECODEM aimed to analyze the factors that contributed to the success and failure of building guilds in distinct national settings. By studying a forgotten yet highly popular trade union movement, ECODEM not only advances scholarship in Labor and Urban History as well as the interdisciplinary scholarship on economic democracy, but it also contributes to debates in the society about the future of work.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ECODEM studied the goals, ownership structure, and internal management of the building guild movement, a large network of interconnected construction companies owned and governed democratically by trade unions and their members. For this purpose, ECODEM analyzed a wide range of primary sources, including business reports, company agreements, contracts, debates in parliament, unpublished correspondences, personal papers, and numerous books, pamphlets, and articles that appeared in the socialist and trade union press of early interwar Britain and Weimar Germany. ECODEM thus presented the building guilds as a vivid illustration of the twofold strategy by which British and German socialist, trade union functionaries, and organized workers believed work could be made more democratic, namely by making sure, on the one side, that consumers were provided with decent and affordable housing while guaranteeing, on the other hand, that employees participate in making the decisions that directly affect their immediate work realities.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ECODEM has advanced the state of the art in three fields, namely in (1) urban history, (2) the history of socialism, and (3) the interdisciplinary study of industrial and economic democracy.
(1) Urban historians have long studied the impact of democratic reform on architecture and urban housing in interwar Europe, but they have virtually overlooked that organized labor also aimed to make construction itself more democratic. By studying the rise of building guilds in interwar Europe, ECODEM presented a largely forgotten trade union movement that gave construction workers a say in the organization and management of their work while serving the wider public through non-for-profit construction. ECODEM also showed that some of the most celebrated works of modernist architecture of the 1920s and early 1930s were built by these building guilds.
(2) ECODEM revealed, second, that interwar Europe’s building guilds drew heavily on the largely forgotten theory of guild socialism. Most social historians have so far tended to dismiss guild socialism as an insignificant episode in British labor history. ECODEM, by contrast, demonstrated that not only did guild socialist theory influence practical experiments in industry (such as the building guilds ECODEM studied) but also that guild socialism had a strong impact on socialist thought outside of early-twentieth-century Britain. In short, ECODEM advanced the current scholarship by redefining guild socialism as a transnational movement.
(3) By investigating the building guilds’ internal procedures of democratic decision-making, ECODEM presented a historical case study for the interdisciplinary research on industrial and economic democracy. In particular, ECODEM suggested that the building guilds peculiar ownership and decision-making structure, which aimed to combined public control with worker self-government, provides an interesting model not only for academic research but also for civil society actors interested in making work more democratic.