Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany
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Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany
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Overview
---Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472025992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 02/24/2010 |
| Series: | Social History, Popular Culture, And Politics In Germany |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 509 KB |
About the Author
Dennis Sweeney is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta.
Read an Excerpt
Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany
By Dennis Sweeney
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2009 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11678-2
Chapter One
Company Paternalism in the Industrial Saar
On 24 April 1890, workers of the Wendel coking plant in Hirschbach went on strike in an effort to secure wage increases, changes to the company pension and sickness fund, an eight-hour shift for workers at the blast furnace, and ten-hour shifts for all others. One week later, Dr. Hallwachs, the factory director, signaled his company's refusal to meet the demands or even to bargain with the workers: "A wage increase will not be granted. Whoever does not want to work can leave, but you will never work at this factory again. No Kaiser or king can help you here, for here we are the masters." Hallwachs's dismissal of all authority beyond his own and that of his managers and his reference to the employers as "masters" of the factory were not products of the immediate circumstances of the labor dispute in Hirschbach during the spring of 1890. Rather, they expressed a set of understandings about employer prerogative and invoked a wider discourse about workplace relations that were common throughout the Saar and the industrial regions of Germany and Europe in the nineteenth century-a discourse that was variously institutionalized in the disciplinary codes, social provisions, and rituals that made up the paternalist factory regime in Saar mining, iron and steel production, and glass and ceramics manufacturing.
This paternalist regime-the "Stumm system"-in Saar heavy industry is the subject of this chapter. German historians have interpreted this model as either a static preindustrial holdover or an entailed expression of underlying economic conditions and imperatives. This chapter examines paternalism as a historically determinate discourse about work relations and moral order, which was materialized in a conjuncturally specific set of factory institutions and managerial practices. It interprets the actual terms and propositions of paternalist discourse, its explicit claims and implicit assumptions, in order to demonstrate the ways it combined economically liberal definitions of the private labor contract and employer prerogative with moralizing and gendered understandings of work and the factory "family." This chapter then examines the ways in which paternalist discourse was articulated to multiple forms of business ownership, a certain model of workplace discipline and company social welfare, a set of company rituals, and wider institutions of public authority that were entirely "rational" and appropriate to their times, particularly when they are compared with paternalist factory regimes in other regions of Germany and Europe.
In the final section, this chapter argues that the factory paternalism of Stumm and other Saar employers became a model for the imperial German welfare state of the 1870s to the 1880s. The latter differed from the other European welfare and regulatory measures in terms of its predominant focus on social insurance over state inspection and direct oversight, a divergence that was in large part due to the influence of Saar and other German industrialists in the making of the early welfare state. Rather than treating paternalism as an originary or self-contained managerial discourse derived from preindustrial values or from a managerial logic immanent to the monopoly phase of German capitalism, this chapter explores the ways in which the "Stumm system" was elaborated and sustained in historically contingent discursive-political fields and the specific institutional matrices of industrial organization and state formation in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Saar Paternalism and Political Economy
Until very recently, the historiographical debate over industrial paternalism in Germany had been curiously silent about the actual terms and propositions of paternalism as a discourse and their articulations in managerial practices-that is, the complex of workplace discipline and social provision that constituted the paternalist factory regime. German historians committed to the preindustrial thesis have ignored Stumm's own self-description as a "modern man," while those concerned to show how paternalist ideas were compatible with the extralinguistic forces of monopoly capitalism have overlooked the productivity of paternalist discourse. But the economic terms and propositions of Saar paternalism were more than just responses to the evolving and autonomous relations and institutions of the industrial workplace in the monopoly phase of German capitalism; they were meaningful, productive, and highly mobile elements, subject to various kinds of articulatory practice during the imperial era. When read for their specific meanings in this way, it is clear that the economic dimensions of paternalist discourse in the Saar derived not from preindustrial or archaic values but from the implicit assumptions and overt commitments of bourgeois political economy and that they helped to shape the industrial workplace in the Saar.
Despite their presumptive invasiveness, Stumm often defended his managerial practices from the perspectives of bourgeois political economy and even rejected the "feudal" label given to him by his political opponents. In his numerous appearances from the 1860s on, before the Reichstag of the North German Confederation, the Prussian Upper House, the German Reichstag, local political meetings, and ceremonies with his own workers in Neunkirchen, Stumm described his work rules and welfare provisions in terms of bourgeois-liberal assumptions about the duties and responsibilities of the individual, the "free labor contract," and the economic imperatives and interests of modern industrial society. He embraced the bourgeois ethos of self-determination and individualism, not only in his antitheoretical rejection of "book learning" (Bücherweisheit) in favor of a model of the employer who draws from the "world of practical life experience," but also in his description of the central dimension of the paternalist factory regime: its foundation in the "personal relationship between employer and worker." The latter was understood in part as a relationship between two bargaining and self-interested individuals, partners in a negotiated "wage contract," in which employer and employee entered into an agreement over the terms and conditions of employment. This meant the employer's acceptance of workers as full "citizens" operating under the conditions of legal equality. In response to socialist claims that industrial workers had been "degraded to the level of a fourth estate," for example, Stumm insisted before his own workforce in 1895, "The working class [Arbeiterschaft] today is completely equal to all other categories of citizens, and I will never agree that the worker ... possesses less value than a Kommerzienrat or a government minister." Moreover, he argued that because the hierarchy of positions in a factory was characterized by a wide range of job titles, tasks could not be divided into the two simple categories of employers and workers. "'Self-reliance is the name of the game' [Selbst ist der Mann] is the principle of every diligent worker," Stumm maintained, arguing that this principle would get the worker "the furthest in relation to the employer." This view corresponded with an understanding that limited the role of the state in the industrial workplace and that bore some traces of the "night watchman state" of economic liberalism. During the Reichstag debate over the new Industrial Code Bill in 1890, Stumm explicitly defined the state as a guarantor of the "freedom of the wage contract"; its role was to defend the allegedly natural relations of authority that obtained in civil society.
In my view the state should not intervene directly or in a partisan way in these relationships, and at the very least it may not undermine authority where authority is present. The state must value and protect the authority of the employer just as much as it does the authority of its own organs, and those of the churches and the schools. Naturally, I find it completely appropriate that the state enacts measures in order to prevent the misuse of this authority; for the misuse of authority damages authority in general.
Stumm therefore objected to attempts by the state to restrict employer control over employee behavior outside of the factory and to regulate the degree of penalties employers could impose on workers as well as factory work rules in general: "the legislator has nothing to say about the content of the factory work code ... that must be left to the agreement between worker and employer." Such interference violated a "fundamental principle" of the "free labor contract": the right of workers and employers to agree on the terms of employment freely and independently. Like many nineteenth-century political economists and despite his willingness routinely to call on the state to crush independent labor organizations, Stumm ignored the glaring asymmetry of power and conditions of existence between the wealthy industrialist and the wage earner, whose reliance on paid employment for survival could not simply be reduced to a "choice" between entering into a "wage contract" or not.
These claims were deemed compatible with the most far-reaching disciplinary rules of the paternalist factory regime. It was on the basis of the need for reliable, diligent labor in the factory that Stumm defended his practice of penalizing workers at his steelworks (especially by means of workplace fines) for civil infractions taking place outside of work. In 1891, he insisted that "the behavior of workers in and outside of the factory absolutely cannot be separated from each other."
A worker who dedicates himself to dissolute moral conduct outside the factory will also not be able to function at the workplace. If he or a foreman runs a store or a business, then connections will necessarily be established between foreman and workers that would have some influence on their relationship in the factory to the disadvantage of other workers. If workers frivolously file charges in court, say, because their wives have insulted one another, then it will be impossible to prevent the conflict and quarrel from entering the factory. If half-ripe lads, who do not earn sufficient wages, get married prematurely and bring children into the world, then they will not be in a position to support and rear the latter, and they will lose the necessary strength and enthusiasm to do their work. Whoever does not followed the principle "honesty is the best policy" in his private life will not be able to resist the temptation to appropriate valuable materials, which lie about unlocked in the factory.
In this sense, Stumm understood his factory work rules and disciplinary regime as a means "to develop" each employee into "a competent and well-behaved worker." This kind of discipline, Stumm argued in 1898, was "absolutely necessary in a rational enterprise that is supposed to remain competitive." Moreover, his unabashed commitment to excluding trade unions from his steelworks and attacking local publicans even for making their rooms available to trade unions in Neunkirchen derived from his rejection of collective negotiations of any kind. The association of workers, in that sense, violated the "freedom" of the individual and subverted the "personal relationship" between employer and employee. Stumm vehemently opposed social democracy not only for its revolutionary doctrine and its variously "immoral" commitments-including its opposition to the bourgeois family and marriage, the churches, the monarchy, and state authority-but also for the ways its supporters brought their "tyranny" to workers. In a curious rhetorical inversion, he claimed that the real threat to the "freedom" of workers was not excessive paternalist control over workers' lives, anchored in the asymmetry of social power between employer and employee, but the coercive threats to a worker's "body and life" in the efforts of independent trade union "agitators" and Social Democratic "seducers of workers" to organize and mobilize workers for industrial actions and collective bargaining. When a worker joined such a "combative organization," he was brought under the spell of "outside agitators" who "destroyed his independence." By 1898, Stumm was celebrating "American industry"-the classic signifier of the economic modern for contemporaries and subsequent scholars-for its efficiency, productivity, and growing influence over world markets at the expense of the British; he attributed this superiority mainly to the fact that American employers had achieved "mastery" over the trade unions. Finally, as Stumm maintained in his speeches before the Reichstag in 1890, paternalist control over the lives of workers off the job, including the infamous marriage clause at the Neunkirchen steelworks, was authorized not by "feudal" privilege or birthright but in part by the "free wage contract" itself, which contained these rules and allowed the worker to accept them or not. This, according to Stumm, was a coercion-free exchange: "If a worker does not comply with this arrangement [i.e., the marriage clause], he will not be penalized; rather, I would pose a question like: do you want to submit to the rules that I have presented to you or do you want to give up this job? This has nothing to do with punishment."
The social provisions associated with the paternalist factory regime, from bonuses to company housing, were framed by a similar capitalist logic. Stumm and other Saar industrialists never made a secret of the "rational" economic motivations behind their extensive benefits and welfare programs. In their main press organ, the Saarbrücker Gewerbeblatt, they described the "patriarchal ... welfare provisions" of local heavy industry as a means for promoting the "good behavior" of workers and their "long-term competence" and for reducing labor turnover and accidents at the workplace-all of which contributed to the "prosperity of the ... factory." In a similar way, Stumm described the importance of wage bonuses in securing a "lasting, settled population" in order to reduce labor mobility and to stabilize his labor force. This was a common motivation behind social provisions, echoed in the statements of officials at the foreign-owned Burbach steelworks and of Saar mining officials, who referred to the "purpose" of attracting a "core of workers" (Arbeiterstamm). Company housing and housing loans and premiums, which extended employer prerogative most comprehensively into the everyday private lives of workers and their families, were similarly understood as mechanisms for securing a stable workforce and for inculcating the habits of "economic man." According to an essay cited in the Saarbrücker Gewerbeblatt, a worker's "property makes him thrifty and economical [haushälterisch]," Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany so that "he learns to value and put to use the smallest savings for his household."
The Moral Dimensions of Work and the Factory "Family"
Saar paternalism articulated other meanings that cannot be reduced to these strictly economic concerns and ambitions. The paternalist factory regime was also structured in a relation of moral tutelage in which work was defined by its moral properties and in which the employer or factory director was figured as the moral guardian of workers. In this context, comprehensive work rules and welfare programs were explicitly motivated by moral concerns and designed to attend to the moral development of workers. Moreover, these intentions and practices were framed by a wider paternalist vision of a factory "family," ordered according to bourgeois codes of sexual difference, and instantiated in the regime of discipline and social provision. In these ways, Saar paternalism combined capitalist rationalities with bourgeois concerns about moral and familial order in an ideological discourse capable of interarticulating diverse-though not incompatible-assumptions and intentions.
Saar employers routinely invoked morality and moral concerns in their dealings with workers and wrote moral concerns directly into their factory work rules, which were designed to inculcate in workers what local employers defined as respectable and moral behavior. Stumm explicitly described his relationship to his workers as one of moral tutelage, motivated by his "moral sense of duty" and "Christian conviction." He believed that the moral "education of the worker" by means of his disciplinary code, one of the "moral obligations" prescribed by his "conscience" and his "God," was more important than the social provisions of the paternalist regime because it had the most direct effect on the behavior of his workers. Other employers shared this perspective. Toward this end, several local firms promulgated work rules that targeted employee behavior both inside and outside of the factory. Stumm announced bluntly in work rule 44, "Every foreman and worker will conduct himself outside the factory in a way which corresponds to the dignity of the house of Gebrüder Stumm; you can expect that your private behavior will always be subject to the firm's scrutiny, and that improper conduct outside the factory will result in termination when there is no applicable penalty in the existing factory regulations." At most large firms, workers were subjected to fines or dismissal for drinking, sleeping, or violation of factory discipline, but they were also punished for "violations against good morals" and activities related to civil "disturbances" and "excesses" (e.g., public drunkenness; the discharge of weapons during Christening celebrations, weddings, or New Year's parties; or resistance against police officials). Officials of the Mining Office commanded their employees to behave in such a way as "to bring honor to your estate and occupation," especially in relation their workplace superiors, and penalized miners for various kinds of civil infractions or other "excesses," including fighting that took place away from the collieries. Company officials at private Saar firms also monitored other aspects of the moral lives of their workforce. At the Stumm concerns in Neunkirchen, foremen were required to observe the drinking habits of their employees: those below forty years of age who "appeared" to drink too much and thus represented both a moral threat and a future financial burden on the company's sickness fund were immediately dismissed. The disciplinary code demanded that they report all manner of employee "excess" taking place "outside of the factory."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Work, Race, and the Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany by Dennis Sweeney Copyright © 2009 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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