The issue of workers’ participation in company management reached the Constituent Assembly after a period of renewed centrality during the Resistance, when, in an attempt to create a new model of economic development, it was decided to establish management boards. The theme was at the core of the political, legal and economic debate throughout the transition to republican democracy, becoming one of the unsolved problems of the intense period of institutional renewal that characterized the early postwar years. The article reconstructs how the subject was elaborated by the political cultures and social forces at the time, and the steps leading to its introduction into the Constitution by means of Article 46.