Lederer’s 1931 ADGB lecture argues that the forty-hour week is not a narrow wage-policy demand but a response to a transformed capitalism. Working time must be judged within the world crisis, technical upheaval, blocked investment, and mass unemployment. The Depression is unprecedented not simply by degree but because degree has become kind.
Es ist etwas anderes, ob eine Krise mit 7, 8, 10 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit oder mit 25 Prozent Arbeitslosigkeit zu kämpfen hat.
English translation: It is one thing whether a crisis has to contend with 7, 8, or 10 percent unemployment, and quite another with 25 percent unemployment.
Across six sections he moves from causes of the world crisis, through politics and investment, to capital values, structural unemployment, and the cultural meaning of shortened hours. The opening sections reconstruct the crisis from production outward. During and after the war, technical change spread simultaneously through raw materials, agriculture, transport, mining, and processing. Earlier capitalist disturbances could be absorbed because one branch led while others followed; now rationalization creates overcapacity and releases labor across the system. Since capitalism has no plan, innovation produces disproportions that actors discover only afterward.
Daher wird man in einer kapitalistischen Wirtschaft immer überrascht werden.
English translation: Therefore, in a capitalist economy one will always be taken by surprise.
Lederer’s first conceptual move is to distinguish social organization of production from capitalist organization of scarcity. The boom inflated stock values and cheapened credit for large combines, while many small and medium firms, often export-capable, lacked operating capital. Cartels and tariff walls do not foreshadow socialism; they restrict output, keep organized prices high, and depress the unorganized sectors. A socialist order would organize production to enlarge the social product, not defend artificial prices.
The lecture then widens to politics. Reparations, short-term foreign lending, and market panic have made political events economically decisive, yet Lederer rejects the belief that political pacification alone would cure the crisis. Autarky is equally false: modern technique has outgrown national markets, and forced self-sufficiency means poverty, not freedom.
kein Volk ist so abhängig wie ein armes Volk.
English translation: no people is so dependent as a poor people.
In the central economic section, Lederer asks where investment can actually go. Cheap credit alone is no remedy if it finances unusable capacity or prestige works without a self-sustaining market. The first task is to restart production within existing capacity by extending operating credit to viable firms and by breaking artificially high prices.
Die Ausnutzung der vorhandenen Produktionskapazität müßte daher die erste Forderung sein.
English translation: The utilization of existing productive capacity ought therefore to be the first demand.
The following section on capital values completes this diagnosis. Depression raises the real burden of fixed-interest claims while wages, prices, and productive returns fall. Lederer therefore treats contract rights historically: creditor claims cannot remain untouched after labor incomes and rights have already been cut. But German “Redeflation” in isolation is also rejected, because national currency action cannot solve a crisis rooted in international interdependence.
The argument reaches the forty-hour week through technological unemployment. Lederer rejects the classical doctrine that workers displaced by machinery are automatically reabsorbed through lower prices, new demand, or higher profits.
daß die alte nationalökonomische Theorie einer automatischen Kompensation nicht richtig ist.
English translation: that the old economic theory of automatic compensation is not correct.
New industries, markets, and credit channels are needed to absorb released labor, and these may lag far behind mechanization. Hence even after cyclical recovery, a large “strukturelle Arbeitslosigkeit” may remain. Shorter hours are therefore both emergency policy and durable structural reform: if technical progress reduces the necessary labor volume, work must be distributed more evenly among the working population. Lederer even allows that the tempo of technical progress may need social braking—not the abolition of innovation, but its subordination to collective purposes.
The final section gives this policy its ethical and cultural force. The forty-hour week expresses solidarity because employed workers support sharing work even where full wage compensation is uncertain.
das glänzendste Zeugnis für die Lebendigkeit des Solidaritätsgefühls innerhalb der Arbeiterklasse
English translation: the most brilliant testimony to the vitality of the sense of solidarity within the working class
Leisure is not mere rest; it is a terrain of emancipation. The unions must help turn free time into education, political formation, and personal development. Lederer’s relevance lies in this synthesis of crisis theory, finance, world-market dependence, technological unemployment, and labor-time reform. The forty-hour week is a means of making productivity humanly meaningful: not the machine’s discard of labor, but the worker’s freedom.
Wir müssen anstreben eine Befreiung der persönlichen Kräfte durch den technischen Fortschritt
English translation: We must strive for a liberation of personal capacities through technical progress.
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