In Europe worker participation in management decision making is an established idea. In the NL, every firm with more than 100 employees must form a works council of up to 25 employees.

By instinct and tradition, U.S. labor unions have been content to leave the actual running of companies to management, preferring to stress the bread-and-butter issues of wages, hours and working conditions. But in Europe, worker participation in management decision making is an established idea that keeps spreading continually into more…

A typically worldly, multilingual Dutchman Gerrit Wagner, is the new chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell, a globe-spanning industrial empire that employs 165,000 people.

A typically worldly, multilingual Dutchman, who spent part of his youth as an anti-Nazi resistance fighter, has just taken over the top job in a globe-spanning industrial empire that employs 165,000 people, owns and charters a fleet of 200 ships and lately has encountered some rough weather. Gerrit (“Gerry”) Wagner…

Changes in fashions, imports from Japan and general economic uncertainty, European manufacturers of synthetic fibers are suffering, like AKZO, laying off more than 6,000 workers.

Hit by a one-two-three punch of changes in fashions, imports from Japan and general economic uncertainty, European manufacturers of synthetic fibers are suffering. Many of their plants are working at only 70% to 80% of capacity. At that level, the profits of older and smaller plants have been wiped…

Sony Corp. will open a distribution and service center to be located, in the Netherlands, Akio Morito recalls, “I saw an agricultural country and yet it was producing goods of excellent quality.

IN 1953, a young businessman named Akio Morita made his first trip outside Japan to investigate export prospects for his struggling little electronics company. He was dismayed to find that in the sophisticated markets of the U.S. and Europe, the words Made in Japan were a mocking phrase for…

Time’s reporter is aboard the brand-new Esso of The Netherlands tanker Europoort, a very large crude carrier. The Europoort has many luxuries for the crewman.

Since the Torrey Canyon disaster in 1967, the world’s ever bigger oil tankers have drawn worse and worse publicity. Viewers with alarm see them as oil-leaking time bombs that defile the seas with toxic black goo. Tankermen have a different perspective. Sailing calmly through gales of criticism, they supply the…

At least nine huge U.S. corporations are foreign-controlled: Royal Dutch/Shell Group controls 69% of Shell Oil. Netherlands-British Unilever and dutch AKU controls American Enka.

AMERICAN investment in foreign countries is often an irritation to foreigners, who worry about alien economic dominance. What is far less visible and less controversial is the great foreign stake in the U.S. Few Americans realize that when they launder clothes with Lever Brothers’ Lux, drink Lipton’s Tea, open a…

Shell group is second in the world oil industry (after Jersey Standard) and the largest industrial enterprise of any kind outside the U.S. Shell’s earnings rose in 1969 7.9% to $1 billion.

“Oil is seldom found where it is most needed, and seldom most needed where it is found,” says L.E.J. Brouwer, senior managing director of Royal Dutch/Shell. Brouwer speaks from sometimes painful experience. Though the Shell group is second in the world oil industry (after Jersey Standard) and the largest industrial…

Fairchild will build a F28 compact-jet in cooperation with Royal Netherlands Aircraft Factories Fokker. The Dutch company has designed the plane and built its prototype.

The roar of publicity over such super-commercial airplanes as the SST and Boeing’s 747 jumbo jet has largely drowned out the hum of a smaller but still important market. Lured by the economy of jet planes and lifted by their earnings from increased traffic, regional airlines around the U.S. have…

Leave it to the Dutch to be different. Before the Dutch Parliament this week is a bill that will make a private company out of the government-held Dutch State Mines.

Leave it to the Dutch to be different. While industry is being nationalized from Italy to Indonesia, The Netherlands has decided to move in just the opposite direction. Before the Dutch Parliament this week is a bill that will make a private company out of the government-held Dutch State…

Lately rumors of huge natural gas findings on the Waddenzee islands have brought other oil companies rushing in with hopes of getting a piece or prospecting offshore.

On the wind-whipped Waddenzee Islands of The Netherlands last week, battered landing craft disgorged load after load of equipment and intense men from as far away as Texas, Kuwait and Brunei. Growling Land-Rovers raced up and down sandy stretches recently surrendered by vacationing Dutchmen; helicopters whirred overhead. The invaders represented…

After five years of glaring at their old colonial masters, the hard-pressed Indonesians are showing some willingness to do business with the Dutch. Frits Philips made an agreement.

∙ After five years of glaring at their old colonial masters, the hard-pressed Indonesians are showing some willingness to do business with the Dutch. Philips Lamp President Frits Philips, 58, whose giant corporation wrote off Indonesian factories worth $5,300,000 after President Sukarno kicked the Dutch out, is just back from…

Amsterdam based fashion retailer C. & A. Brenninkmeyer Co., holds a burning ambition: to break into the U.S. retail market in grand style.

The workingman’s friend in Europe is Amsterdam-based C. & A. Brenninkmeyer Co., whose 100 stores from Wales to West Germany outfit the whole family in middlebrow fashions at lowbrow prices. The Brenninkmeyer family itself believes in tight budgets and tight lips, regarding secrecy as its greatest strength and publicity as…

With an abruptness that stunned the aviation industry, KLM’s president Van der Beugel resigned his job. KLM lost $21 million in 1961 and another $14 million in 1962’s first nine months.

Eighteen months ago, when he moved in as president of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, diminutive (5 ft. 3 in.) Ernst Hans van der Beugel, 44, looked like a bright hope. A brilliant ex-civil servant who had held the top career post in the Dutch Foreign Office, he appeared to have…

A short account on Fokker, the Dutch plane manufacturer, its history and its current status.

For more than a decade, half the world’s aircraft manufacturers have been struggling to develop a latter-day replacement for the traditional workhorse of the airways, Douglas Aircraft’s 26-year-old DC-3. The planemaker that has come closest is Royal Netherlands Fokker Aircraft, whose sleek, twin-turboprop F-27 Friendship is now used by 36…

Wherever a Dutchman turns these days his gaze is apt to fall on a product of a vigorous giant, fiber maker, known as A.K.U., producing half the nylon stockings sold in The Netherlands.

Wherever a Dutchman turns these days, his gaze is apt to fall on a product of a vigorous giant known as A.K.U. (pronounced Ah-coo). For A.K.U. (short for Algemene Kunstzijde Unie, which means Amalgamated Rayon Union) produces half the nylon stockings sold in The Netherlands, as well as fibers used…