The Belgian social pact

War chronologies record under 24 January 1944 that a “social pact”, a plan for post-war social reforms, was secretly signed in German-occupied Belgium. The substance of this entry is true, but the date is not: historians of Belgian social security agree in placing the conclusion of the agreement in April 1944. Some of them give 20 April (this is the date given, among others, by the historian Dirk Luyten and by the biographer of the text’s principal author, Henri Fuss), while others, following the historians Patrick Pasture and Martin Conway, give 24 April 1944. January 1944 was thus a time of the last and most difficult talks in the clandestine committee that had been preparing the agreement for more than two years.

A committee without a name

Belgium had been under German military administration since the capitulation of the Belgian army in May 1940. The government of Hubert Pierlot was in exile in London, King Leopold III remained in the country as a prisoner, and everyday life meant rationing, the black market, hunger and, from the autumn of 1942, the forced deportation of workers to the Reich. The occupiers dissolved the old trade union confederations and tried to replace them with a single corporatist union subordinated to the new order.

Part of the pre-war elite believed that the country had to be prepared now for the day of liberation. What they feared most was a repeat of 1918: chaos, unemployment, soaring prices and revolutionary ferment. In October 1941 the initiative was taken by Henri Fuss, for many years director-general of the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, who had been removed from his post by the Germans. He brought together representatives of the socialist trade union confederation, the CGTB, and men from the Central Industrial Committee (CCI), the organisation of the big employers. The first meeting took place on 17 October 1941.

The group had no official name; later it came to be called the committee of workers and employers. The employers were represented by Paul Goldschmidt-Clermont and Georges Velter of the metalworking industry federation, and the meetings were also attended by Alexandre Galopin, governor of the powerful Société Générale holding company, who was murdered by collaborators in February 1944. The workers’ side consisted of Henri Pauwels, president of the Confederation of Christian Trade Unions, Arthur Jauniaux, founder of the socialist union of sickness funds, and the CGTB activists Joseph Bondas and Léon Delsinne. They were later joined by the socialists Achille Van Acker and Louis Major. None of the participants had a formal mandate from his organisation; all acted in a personal capacity and risked arrest. They met every week, usually on Fridays, at first in various places, among them Goldschmidt-Clermont’s country house at Ohain near Waterloo (now part of the municipality of Lasne), and later in a small office of the metalworking federation in Brussels. Fuss, as he himself wrote, became chairman and rapporteur “because of enforced idleness”; by many accounts he was the driving force behind the whole enterprise. According to his recollections, the committee never voted – everything had to be agreed unanimously.

From principles of cooperation to social security

At first the talks dealt mainly with the principles and methods of social dialogue: recognition of the trade unions as a partner, collective agreements and joint committees of employers and workers in individual industries. Social security appeared on the agenda only in 1943. It was then that the talks entered their decisive phase, which lasted until the spring of 1944.

The committee was not the only body thinking about the future of Belgian social policy during the war. In London a commission on post-war problems had been working for the government since 1941, and its proposals tended towards a centralised state system inspired by the Beveridge Report of December 1942. At home another clandestine group of economists proposed the opposite – modest, corporatively organised benefits for the weakest only. Fuss later claimed that the members of his committee did not yet know William Beveridge’s work and that their scheme was “authentically Belgian”. Historians treat this claim with some caution, but they stress that the Belgian plan did indeed differ from the British one: instead of a uniform system for all citizens it provided for insurance of wage earners, financed by contributions rather than taxes and managed jointly by employers and unions.

The scheme provided that all the social insurance schemes, which in the inter-war period had grown up separately and often only on a voluntary basis, would become compulsory for wage earners. It was to cover pensions, unemployment insurance, sickness insurance, family allowances and paid holidays. The contributions, deducted from wages and topped up by employers, were to be collected and distributed by a single new body – the National Social Security Office (ONSS/RSZ). The document also provided for wage increases immediately after liberation, to make up for the wartime fall in real earnings, and for a permanent system of collective bargaining.

The price for this was the labour movement’s acceptance of the rules of a market economy. In the document the trade unionists recognised the employers’ right to manage their enterprises and declared their cooperation in raising productivity; in return the employers accepted the unions as a full partner and a broad programme of benefits. The name “social pact” caught on later. The original typescript bore the title “Projet d’accord de solidarité sociale” – a draft agreement on social solidarity.

The signature that never was

The word “draft” was no accident. When the text was ready in April 1944, Van Acker and Major were still unable to sign it on behalf of, respectively, the clandestine Socialist Party and the socialist unions. There was resistance to the agreement among employers and in the Christian movement as well; the Christian unions even concluded separate arrangements with Catholic employers, but in the end they supported the text that their president Pauwels had helped to write. In May 1944 the document was sent through clandestine channels to London, where it arrived by July at the latest. The government-in-exile did not respond to it.

From the underground to the statute book

Brussels was liberated at the beginning of September 1944, and the Pierlot government returned to the country. Fuss regained his post at the Ministry of Labour, and the portfolio of Minister of Labour and Social Welfare went to Van Acker, one of the participants in the clandestine talks. According to Fuss’s account, the scheme was not even on the agenda of the national labour conference held in the autumn of 1944; only when representatives of the unions and employers explained to the surprised prime minister that a ready-made agreement had been worked out under the occupation was it written into the conference’s resolution.

After that things moved quickly. The government feared social unrest – a strong resistance movement including communists was active in the country, and food and coal were scarce – and at the same time feared that various pressure groups would dismantle the compromise before it came into force. On 28 December 1944, during the days of the German offensive in the Ardennes, Van Acker signed a decree-law on social security for workers. To a large extent it reproduced the solutions of the clandestine draft: it established the National Social Security Office, introduced compulsory insurance in all five areas and placed its management in the hands of joint institutions of employers and workers under state supervision. Van Acker recalled years later that he and his officials had worked at night in their overcoats, in an unheated ministry, so that the act could appear before the new year. The text of the agreement was first published in the Ministry of Labour’s bulletin at the beginning of 1945.

The compromise had its critics from the outset. The communists and part of the left accused its authors of handing the working class over to the mercy of capital in exchange for “a few minor improvements”; some employers, for their part, felt that too much had been conceded. Some historians stress that the industrialists made concessions out of fear of revolutionary ferment after liberation.

Place in the war

The Belgian social pact had nothing to do with military operations, yet it was a typical child of the war. Like the Beveridge Report in Britain or the programme of the French National Council of the Resistance of March 1944, it expressed the conviction that after Hitler’s defeat there could be no return to the poverty and conflicts of the 1930s, and that peace had to rest on social security. The historian Martin Conway points out that its real significance lay not so much in a vision of a new era of welfare as in the fact that the work leading up to it showed how much common ground had emerged between former opponents during the occupation. Other scholars point to the influence of pre-war corporatist ideas.

The agreement became the foundation of the Belgian welfare state and of the model of permanent bargaining between unions and employers that has survived in Belgium to this day. As the “social pact” it entered the country’s political memory: in the 1990s the government of Jean-Luc Dehaene tried without success to conclude a “new social pact”, and in 2023 the Flemish government included it in the canon of the most important events in the history of Flanders.