Workers’ control statute adopted

“... workers’ control must be the first basic step

to be taken by any socialist workers’ government”.

V. I. Lenin (November 1918)

14 (27) November, 1917 the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted the "Statute of Workers' Control", under which workers' control was introduced as a mandatory measure in all sectors of the economy, enterprises that had wage earners.

For the first time the principles of workers' control were formulated by the Paris Commune. However, due to a brief existence of the Commune this measure of workers’ management was not implemented in practice. In Russia, after the events of February 1917, at many large factories of Petrograd, Moscow and other industrial centers began to emerge a movement for workers' control, which was a form of interference of workers into the capitalist economy. In October 1917, at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, it was stated that the Soviet regime would establish workers' control over production, regarded as one of the main measures of transition of the capitalist form of economy to the socialist one.

Under the Statute, every major city, province or industrial region had to create a local Council of workers' control. In Petrograd was established the All-Russia Council of workers' control. Bodies of workers' control were the factory committees, councils of seniors, and in large enterprises operated special control commission. The basic form of workers’ management was control over the industrial and technical, and often the commercial and financial activities of enterprises: for example, hiring and firing of workers and employees, the receipt and use of orders.

A new measure of social control of the Soviet state required that the owners of enterprises presented all the documentation to the bodies of workers' control. Otherwise, the heads of enterprises were to answer before the court. Decisions of bodies of workers' control were mandatory for all owners and could be abolished only by the resolution of the supreme bodies of workers' control.

Later the Statute of workers' control had been widely used to justify acts of nationalization of enterprises due to “the refusal to submit to workers' control".

Lit.: Положение о рабочем контроле // Декреты Советской власти. Т. 1. М., 1957; То же [Электронный ресурс]. URL: http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/DEKRET/rab_ctrl.htm; Селицкий В. И. Массы в борьбе за рабочий контроль (март — июль 1917). М., 1971; Фрейдлин Б. М. Очерки истории рабочего движения в России в 1917 г. М., 1967.