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…

Hendrik Bally, a 65-year old man, nearly deaf and blind, who lived with his boss Farmer Kolkman, was badly treated for years.

In The Netherlands, which takes its welfare-state benefits seriously, a conscientious civil servant in the village of Diepenveen (pop. 4,018) decided to go out and inform a local farm hand named Hendrik Bally in person that the government, now that he had turned 65, would henceforth pay him a pension…