Preliminary Programme

“From the Sea into a Can” tells the long durée story of the oil sardine. It argues that this food item deeply transformed maritime communities and the environment. Relying on cheap labor and meagre technology, the canning of fish has often been the first – and for a long time, only – industry available for economic development in peripheral coastal regions, from the shores of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. Can the sardine can tell a holistic history of labor, business, and environment at the coastline? (Show less)

Multinormativity refers to hybrid interrelated processes and dynamics of translating legal codes into legal practice. The 1920 Works Council Act of the Weimar Republic was a regulatory act of the state. It was only in concrete jurisdiction, but also in the respective company practice, that it was subject to a process of negotiation that constituted its legal practice on a small scale. Its specific form was always renegotiated in practice and was thereby subject to different actor constellations and power relations. Even in normative orders that were strongly enforced by the state, such as the unified Weimar Reich legislation, the norm-setting remained an act of redefinition, reinterpretation and appropriation. It is a dynamic process of change in which employers and employees, but also individual groups within the non-homogeneous workforce, explored the leeway available to them. Although the state's claim to regulation in the Weimar Republic was quite advanced and had a unifying effect, it is still reasonable to speak of a multifaceted process of norm concretisation for the German Reich as well. In my paper I will focus on the German company Gutehoffnungshütte to be examined in a case study that is part of a project on non-state law at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory in Frankfurt. This enterprise was a large, subdivided and decentrally structured corporation, which was at the same time mediated via an administrative headquarter and the highly political Department A (A for Arbeiterangelegenheiten), the office of labour affairs. The regional focus of its production was in Westphalia and Bavaria. Thus, despite the unification established by imperial legislation, the company was still present in two highly different, suspiciously opposing reference systems. The company owned plants in Nuremberg and Augsburg (Bavaria) as well as in Gelsenkirchen and Oberhausen (province of Westphalia), among others. While in Augsburg the workforce, consisting of skilled workers, had little tendency to openly engage in conflict, the workforce in the so called red Nuremberg remained a well-organised threat to company peace. Thus, the workers in these two factories draw on very different cultural and social resources, while the "masters of the Ruhr" in Bavaria were eyed with suspicion. By focusing on the self-regulation of non-state actors who are at the same time embedded in a state regulatory framework and the corporate policy, the aim of the paper is to steer the focus away from the major regulatory actors without putting them in false opposition. Industrial relations as a form of regulated self-regulation includes not only the setting of norms, but also the enforcement of norms as well as the regulation of the conflicts that inevitably arise in the process. In the individual plants of the same enterprise, different practices of workplace co-determination developed, whereby at the same time political factors, entrepreneurial decisions, interventions of the administrative headquarter, economic developments of the respective plant and many other factors set influences and limits. Thus, a praxeological approach following Thomas Welskopp can be made fruitful, which, however, is not meant to be a classical comparison, but rather a histoire croisée that starts from the many interwoven concrete objects. It does not take a comparative look at the respective institutions as completed entities, but at the manifold entangled processes of their formation and change. In this way, the study connects to recent research on the company as a political site and field of social action, as well as to recent discussions on bringing together labour history and business history. (Show less)

“How Does Labor Law Travel?” asks us to capsize our intuitive grasp of labor legislation. In the barely industrialized economies of interwar Portugal and Romania, labor law was not so much a way for the state to keep up with economic development as an effort to stimulate it through borrowings from the more advanced countries of the European core, marking the beginning of the “developmentalist” half-century in which employment rights and industrial growth were seen as complementary, by democracies and dictatorships alike. (Show less)