Steiner's replacement for the wage contract: no agreement over labour itself, only over what manager and worker produced together and then divide.
The Contract on the Joint Product in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's positive replacement for the wage contract: an agreement covering not labour itself but the goods a labour manager and a manual worker brought into being together, which the two then divide. Steiner set it out on 26 May 1919 in Ulm, in the opening lecture of the cycle published as Freedom of Thought and Social Forces (GA 333), during the year he carried the threefold social movement through Württemberg. His German phrase is Vertrag über das gemeinsame Erzeugnis, a contract over the common product. The reasoning behind it is that labour power is not a commodity, so it has to be lifted out of the economy and set on the ground of rights, where measure, kind, and hours of work are settled before anyone enters production. Worker-owned firms that pay members a share of the year's result rather than a wage run on this principle today.
The contract on the joint product is the second half of Steiner's argument about labour. The first half is negative: labour power may never be bought. The second half asks what two people should sign instead. His answer is that they contract over the thing they made, not over the hours one of them surrendered, and they divide it between them as partners.
In Steiner's Own Words
Only when contracts can no longer be concluded for labor, but only for the joint production of the labor manager and the manual laborer, when a contract can only be concluded for the joint product, will a dignified existence for all parties arise from it. Then the worker will stand vis-à-vis the labor manager as a free partner. That is what the worker is basically striving for, even if he still cannot form a clear idea of it today. This is the real economic issue for the proletariat, the real economic demand: the liberation of labor power from the economic cycle, the establishment of the right of labor power within the second link of the three-part social organism, the legal basis.
What it Means Today
In the Basque town of Arrasate, called Mondragón in Spanish, the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta arrived in 1941 and spent years teaching local workers. In 1956 five of his students founded the cooperative Ulgor, later Fagor, and the federation grown from it, MONDRAGON Corporation, still runs on an arrangement that reads like Steiner's sentence written into bylaws. A worker there does not sign a wage contract. He subscribes a capital stake, becomes a socio, a member-owner, and draws an anticipo, an advance against the year's result rather than a price paid for his hours. When the books close, the surplus is divided among the members and credited to their individual capital accounts. The ratio between the lowest and highest paid members is decided inside the cooperative by the members themselves, not set by a labour market.
Thalira synthesis: Mondragón is usually read as an economic achievement, but on Steiner's terms its decisive organ is the general assembly, a body of equals, which is a rights organ, and it settles measure and kind and reward before the economy is allowed to work. The contract on the joint product is therefore a rights instrument first and an economic one second.
The practical test is small. Take any employment agreement and ask which of two things it covers: the hours a person hands over, or the product two people made. Steiner held that only the second can be signed between free people.
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