New Left Review I/2, March-April 1960

Michael Barratt Brown

Workers Control in a Planned Society (Jugoslavia- Part II)

The second of two articles on Jugoslavia

up a broad beechwood staircase, past wall-high charts of output, profits and earnings, through the antechamber of the director’s private secretary, I was led majestically by the Workers’ Council chairman to the inner sanctum of the factory director himself. It might have been the managing director’s office in any of Britain’s great industrial corporations, with its beautiful timber panelling, board room table, heavy chairs and long line of windows looking over the whole layout of the works. What was different was that, in the absence of the director, the Workers’ Council chairman, still in his white boiler suit, motioned me to a deep chair, ordered the secretary to bring brandies, coffee, fruit juices and hors d’oeuvres and lifted the switch of the director’s intercom’ to command the central exchange to call the chairman of the management committee and a couple of department heads on the factory ‘tannoy’. He behaved as if he owned the place—which in a manner he did; for, this was Jugoslavija and the first of many industrial enterprises which I visited throughout July of 1959.

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