Victor Mataja’s journal article examines the methodological foundations of official strike statistics through a comparison of systematic publications from the United States, England, France, Italy, and Austria. Its twelve sections move from the purposes and organization of inquiry through definitions, counting units, participation, working conditions, outcomes, and losses, before considering statistical presentation. The central argument is that extensive enumeration does not itself produce adequate social knowledge: statistics must preserve the structure of collective action, distinguish observations from calculations, and organize evidence to investigate relationships. Mataja explicitly acknowledges his institutional position as head of the Austrian ministry’s statistical department; his frequent preference for Austrian procedures is therefore an openly situated methodological judgment.
Strike statistics have two connected purposes. They illuminate workers’ circumstances through demands, wages, hours, and organization, while also investigating industrial conflict as a phenomenon with its own frequency, outcomes, and consequences. Mataja calls these purposes secondary and primary without establishing a hierarchy of importance. Detailed accounts can disclose solidarity and persistence as well as material conditions, and retrospective statistics can improve the public understanding on which conflicts sometimes depend. Reliable inquiry requires trained collectors, timely reporting, cooperation from both parties, and procedures established before events occur. His comparison raises particular doubts about the apparently near-complete American returns collected years after disputes, especially when other agencies report substantial nonresponse.
Definition must precede enumeration. A strike is a suspension of work intended to secure demands from an employer while retaining the prospect of resuming employment. Permanent departure and political demonstrations fall outside this definition; duration and scale do not determine whether an event is technically a strike. Correspondingly, lockouts should concern employers’ attempts to influence workers rather than closures directed against public authorities. Mataja then separates the practical classification of conflict from the attribution of responsibility:
Die Frage nach dem moralischen Rechte oder Unrechte kann durch eine rein formale Lösung der Klassifikation eben keineswegs entschieden werden.
English translation: The question of moral right or wrong can by no means be decided through a purely formal solution to classification.
Classifying disputes by which party demands changed conditions appears symmetrical but makes defensive strikes conceptually problematic and cannot settle who provoked a conflict. Workers demanding the restoration of wages after a depression may formally initiate change without bearing moral responsibility for the rupture. Mataja therefore favors the practically usable distinction between workers withdrawing labor and employers withholding work, while insisting that responsibility requires knowledge of the entire preceding history.
The counting unit is his next decisive concern. Counting establishments rather than strikes fragments coordinated movements and prevents comparisons between single-establishment and group strikes. It also allows one dispute affecting ten establishments to weigh like ten separate disputes. The social object to be counted is an action, not simply a workplace:
Der Strike ist die Ergreifung eines Kampfmittels seitens der Arbeiterschaft, also eine Handlung.
English translation: A strike is the adoption of a means of struggle by the workers, and thus an action.
Unity of action—not merely identical demands, simultaneous timing, or proximity—defines a group strike. Even one establishment can contain two independent strikes. Conversely, coordinated action across places or industries may constitute one dispute. Counting must therefore make collective organization visible rather than erase it through administrative or publication conventions.
The middle sections extend this attention to distinctions within events. Beginning and ending dates require information about changing participation, particularly in group strikes. Immediate occasions must be recorded separately from demands: a defensive conflict may acquire apparently offensive demands, while longstanding grievances may enter an already developing dispute. Mataja distinguishes everyone who ever participated from the maximum simultaneous number and the average participation. He also insists on separating active strikers from nonstriking workers forced into idleness. Combining them may help measure interrupted labor but misrepresents participation and success, since their interests can differ sharply. Wage and working-time information should preserve occupational differences; general averages often obscure precisely the conditions needing explanation.
Success likewise changes meaning with the unit of analysis. A coordinated strike may be partly successful although some workers obtain everything and others nothing. Mataja consequently recommends complementary accounts by strike, worker, and establishment. “Partial success” should identify what was achieved, rather than disguise heterogeneous outcomes under one label.
His extended discussion of losses subjects monetary precision to especially searching criticism. Foregone wages are calculated, not directly observed, and are not equivalent to actual financial loss. Alternative earnings, seasonality, later intensified production, and permanent departure from employment complicate the calculation. Employer losses require an uncertain comparison with what would have happened without the strike; production shortfalls, prices, continuing costs, customer relationships, and subsequent recovery cannot simply be read from accounts. Nor can losses in affected establishments represent losses throughout the economy:
Die in Geld ausgedrückten Verluste der von Arbeitseinstellungen ergriffenen Betriebe, bezw. ihrer Inhaber dürfen daher keineswegs als Verluste der Industrie oder der Unternehmerklasse angesehen werden.
English translation: The losses expressed in money of establishments affected by strikes, or of their owners, must therefore by no means be regarded as losses of industry or of the entrepreneurial class.
Competitors may gain from another firm’s disruption. Mataja’s scrutiny of American and English reports exposes both incomplete coverage presented as comprehensive totals and proxies incapable of measuring the claimed loss. He prefers qualified aggregate estimates to individual figures whose apparent exactness exceeds their evidential basis.
The concluding section proposes a unified case table, explanatory documents, summaries, and cross-tabulations relating outcomes to duration, scale, demands, and workforce composition. Historical description remains necessary, but analytical combinations are needed to investigate regularities. The article’s lasting relevance lies in this conjunction of substantive and statistical reasoning: categories and counting units must represent social relationships, while numerical claims must remain accountable to their collection methods and limits.
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