Emil Lederer and Jakob Marschak, Die Klassen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt und ihre Organisationen (1927)

Lederer and Marschak’s study recasts the labor market as a field of organized class formation rather than a neutral arena of individual exchange. Its point of departure is sociological: industrial capitalism brings workers together under shared technical, disciplinary, and economic conditions, so their behavior cannot be explained by the isolated choices assumed by classical market theory.

Die Arbeiter reagieren nicht als Individuen, sondern nur als Gesamtheit auf ihre ökonomische Lage (was erstmals zu erklären sein wird), und damit sind zugleich auch schon zahlreiche Berührungspunkte zur sozialen und politischen Aktion der Arbeiterklasse gegeben.

English translation: Workers react to their economic situation not as individuals but only as a collective (which will first have to be explained), and with this numerous points of contact are already given with the social and political action of the working class.

From this premise, the authors shift the unit of analysis. The factory and the industrial enterprise produce recurring pressures toward organization, and the labor market itself is transformed when unions and employers’ associations bargain as collective actors. Market exchange remains important, but it is no longer intelligible as a sequence of private contracts among atomized buyers and sellers.

Der „Arbeitsmarkt“ ist jetzt nicht mehr unter dem Bilde einer Auktion oder eines Bazars aufzufassen, mit individuellen Käufern und Verkäufern, sondern die Gesamtheit von Arbeitern und Unternehmern ist es, welche zu je einem Subjekt zusammenwächst.

English translation: The "labor market" is now no longer to be conceived on the model of an auction or a bazaar, with individual buyers and sellers; rather, it is the totality of workers and of entrepreneurs which coalesces into a single subject on each side.

The study then follows the institutional consequences of this collectivization. Trade unions and employer organizations are treated as forms through which class antagonism becomes durable, negotiable, and legally significant. Collective agreements occupy a central place because they translate conflict into general rules for wages and working conditions. Lederer and Marschak stress that autonomous social practice often precedes legislation: law codifies and stabilizes patterns already created by organized bargaining.

In der Tat: Während die Gesetzgebung über das Tarifvertragswesen noch in ihren Anfängen steht, haben die autonomen Tarifvertragsparteien den ganzen in Betracht kommenden Inhalt der Tarifsatzungen ziemlich einheitlich herausgearbeitet.

English translation: Indeed: while legislation on the collective bargaining system is still in its infancy, the autonomous parties to collective agreements have worked out the entire relevant content of collective-agreement provisions in a fairly uniform manner.

This does not make the argument simply voluntarist. The more collective bargaining becomes a constitutive element of social order, the more sharply questions of compulsion, legal extension, representation, and state enforcement arise. The authors therefore place labor law at the intersection of economics and sociology: legal norms are neither external to the market nor reducible to state command, but emerge from the struggle to organize a market already structured by classes.

Wie im Tarifvertragswesen bildet auch hier der Gegensatz von Zwang und Freiwilligkeit den Ausgangspunkt aller prinzipiellen Kontroversen, die die noch im Flusse befindliche Gesetzgebung begleiten und bedingen.

English translation: As in the case of the collective agreement, so here too the contrast between compulsion and voluntariness forms the starting point of all the fundamental controversies that accompany and condition the legislation still in flux.

The work’s broader significance lies in its account of how labor-market organizations outgrow the immediate wage struggle. Once organized workers and entrepreneurs act as collective subjects, they press beyond the contract of employment toward influence over the national economy, public policy, and forms of vocational or corporative representation. Lederer and Marschak thus connect the micro-social formation of class in the workplace with the macro-institutional problem of modern economic governance. Their central conceptual move is to show that “market,” “class,” and “organization” are not separable domains: the industrial labor market produces collective actors, those actors reshape the terms of exchange, and their agreements and conflicts become the basis of modern social and legal order.