West Germany: Labor's Right Turn

West Germany's 6,400,000-member Trade Union Federation has made a turn toward the right with the election of free-enterprising Ludwig Rosenberg, 59, as chairman. Unlike his up-from-the-factory colleagues, Rosenberg is a lifelong white-collar worker who became a union organizer more out of intellectual conviction than economic necessity, fled the Third Reich in 1933 and later helped the British Ministry of Labor find wartime jobs for thousands of refugees from Hitler. Returning to Germany, he concluded that free competition would best invigorate the West German economy, became foreign affairs chief of the union federation. One of the top-ranking of the surviving Jews in Germany, Rosenberg won out over old-line Marxists in the union.