Preliminary Programme

From the late 19th century onwards, European states began to establish systems of public labour exchanges. These institutions of intermediation have been perceived as important tools of labour market intervention that – in countries like Germany – were soon granted a monopoly over job exchange.

Historical research has examined public labour exchanges mainly from two perspectives: first, as institutions of social policy that were of particular importance for unemployment administration and control, and, second, as institutions that strengthened the state’s capacity to regulate labour relations by placing job placement as means of labour market control outside the reach of both employers and unions.

Although research has thus discussed problems related to labour markets, remarkably little attention has been paid to the question of what labour exchanges actually do with respect to labour markets. It is usually assumed that labour exchanges are an attempt to organise and thereby influence the market by improving processes matching supply and demand. However, the actual practices of labour exchanges and their impact on what has been perceived as the labour market have attracted less attention than the political and administrative contexts of these institutions.

This paper asks how the relationship between labour exchanges and labour markets can be described. It will be argued that the interpretation of labour exchanges as institutions influencing the labour market is based on assumptions that neglect a basic finding of economic sociology: markets have to be understood as phenomena permanently (re-)produced by social practices. As a result, my paper will outline an approach that perceives labour exchanges as sites where labour markets are constructed rather than organised. This includes shifting the focus of research to the practices of labour exchanges. The arguments here will be illustrated by examples from Germany from the late 19th century to the end of the Weimar Republic. (Show less)

When neighbouring Denmark and Norway in 1906-07 introduced voluntary unemployment insurance programmes on a national level based on the Ghent-model, Sweden opted for a policy promoting labour exchanges and tried to establish a national network of municipal and regional exchanges. This paper analyzes the making of the policies on the national level and its effects on the local level with examples from Stockholm. Focus is on the period before WWI when the system was established; the first municipal exchanges was set up in Göteborg in 1902 and in 1914 Sweden had 100 public labour exchanges run by municipalities, county councils and agricultural societies.

Several factors explain why Sweden turned down unemployment insurance in favour of the public labour exchange, imported from Germany. Firstly, the political prospects for the insurance were bad; influential groups in the parliament regarded it as a concession to socialist demands and it was among social policy experts deemed to be too risky an experiment. Secondly, and this is highly important, unemployment per se wasn’t regarded as the major problem. On the contrary, shortage of manpower and the fear of continuing emigration causing further shortages were perceived as more acute problems. The statisticians and economists who designed Swedish labour market policy saw regional and seasonal variations in the labour market (markets is better since no national labour market existed) as the key issues and the objective was to promote co-ordination and organisation. The keywords among social reformers were ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’.

There are no Nordic studies on how the new public labour exchanges functioned in relation to job-seeking workers, unions and employers. The second part of the paper includes such a study – although limited in scale and scope – of the labour exchange in Stockholm, established by the municipality in 1904 after a comparatively agitated debate (the introduction of public labour exchanges was not contested in this way in the other major Nordic towns). The guiding question concerns the effects of municipal intervention intended to intermediate between the established interests in a labour market marked by industrial struggles. (Show less)

In my paper, I discuss the social and political interests that influenced the practices of public labour placement in Austria between 1918 and 1938.

By 1918, labour intermediation in Austria was carried out by different political and social groups: Trade unions, employers' associations, cooperatives, charitable associations and public labour offices. Labour exchange was not only a tool for finding work or employees, but also for maintaining influence on wages, working conditions and qualifications. Besides these commercial employment agencies, newspaper ads as well as informal ways to find work were common forms of labour exchange.

Until 1934, public labour offices were partially based on the institutions already established before. Under certain conditions, trade union labour exchanges as well as those originally run by employers’ associations and cooperatives were authorised to work on behalf of national agencies of labour exchange. As public labour offices, they were supposed to organise a national labour market, provide employment for those willing to work and thereby contribute to political stability. For the first time, their task was also to distribute unemployment benefits. The receipt of financial aid depended on one’s willingness to work, one’s personal financial situation as well as an assessment of labour market developments, gender, age and many other criteria. These criteria were negotiable and subject to change. As such, they were at the centre of political conflicts on labour exchange. These conflicts did not only shape public labour offices’ relations to other forms of labour intermediation, but also the divergent interests of organisations running public labour exchanges.

Considering the different social and political roots of public labour exchange in Austria, I will discuss the question of how the state-run institutions of 1918 and 1934 influenced the segregation of labour markets and the way labour was conceived of. How did they gain influence over other forms? Who was subject to labour intermediation by public labour offices? (Show less)

From the late nineteenth century, social reformers in industrial centres sought to co-ordinate and organise urban labour markets – creating new social categorisations that presaged specific treatment. This paper compares the process of demarcating urban labour markets in northern Europe (mostly Germany and Britain): how official agencies categorised the urban population – to co-ordinate labour supply and demand, to demarcate working lives and to determine the treatment of those in need of help.

Here, we address a double helix: first, the nature of the labour market problem (how it was understood and how it was tackled) and, with this, the object and legitimacy of public intervention in regulating work. The analysis rests on how labour markets were viewed: the principles concerning their proper operation, the agencies involved in securing these principles – and the capacity of the latter to co-ordinate action: to decide who should have priority in securing a job. The aim was to delineate networks of responsibility: to determine who should be referred to which type of agency for what type of treatment. Strasbourg is used as an example of success.

Not all experiments enjoyed such acceptance. Not only the remit of public action but also the authority on which such action was based was drawn into question. When examining specific municipal interventions, we note how public authority was contested. Powers of traditional elites were challenged by demands for democratic accountability on the one hand and by technical expertise on the other. In German cities in particular, the application of scientific solutions to urban problems (the sanitary, gas and electrical engineers: the medical professions, social geneticists and social statisticians) all vindicated a technical mode of urban governance that still could be (and was) challenged both by organised labour and by major employers. In Britain, a strong tradition of economic liberalism, invoking the merits of market competition and of personal liberty, confronted officials trying to apply social scientific solutions to labour markets. Here, employers and labour united to marginalise the state. In each country, the object and nature of official interventions had to compromise with established interests, if successful agency integration was to be secured. In brief, labour market co-ordination strategies became embedded in industrial struggles and in the role government played in their resolution. (Show less)