Richard Schüller, Die österreichische Handwerker-Gesetzgebung (1897)

Richard Schüller’s journal article examines Austrian craft legislation as a test of economic policy’s movement away from freedom of trade toward public regulation. Its five sections trace the dismantling and partial restoration of guild restrictions, investigate their administrative and social effects, assess compulsory craft associations, and examine renewed legislative proposals. The central distinction is between institutions that could strengthen small producers through cooperation and restrictions that preserve masters’ position by making workers cheaper and more dependent. Schüller accepts the need for organization but argues that Austrian policy confuses constructive coordination with obsolete guild privilege.

Section I reconstructs an uneven history of liberalization. The patent of 1731 removed conspicuous guild abuses without eliminating the system’s underlying restrictions. Eighteenth-century governments subsequently freed predominantly domestic industries, detached developing large-scale industries from guild control, and exempted factories. Austria initially advanced further toward industrial freedom than the German states, but its progress stalled before the liberal trade ordinance of 1859. Schüller relates the later reversal to economic circumstances rather than an enduring hostility to competition: expanding exports sustained crafts during the 1850s and 1860s, whereas the subsequent crisis redirected export production toward domestic markets and mobilized small producers politically. Their alliance with aristocratic interests helped produce the restrictive amendment of 1883.

That amendment combined compulsory associations with a qualification requirement for designated crafts. Entry into independent production generally required documented apprenticeship and journeyman service, although successful vocational schooling could substitute. Factories, commerce, and domestic industry remained exempt. Schüller distinguishes the associations’ potentially useful organizational form from the qualification requirement’s immediate coercive effects. In section II, he shows how the latter transformed occupational boundaries into objects of administrative adjudication:

Die autoritative Abgrenzung der Gewerbe ist hierdurch eine Notwendigkeit geworden.

English translation: The authoritative delimitation of trades has thereby become a necessity.

Once admission depended on training in a particular craft, authorities had to decide which operations belonged exclusively to it. Disputes between bakers and confectioners over ingredients and products illustrate how regulation generated prolonged litigation and locally divergent rights. Meanwhile, excluded occupations petitioned for protected status. The law’s broad appeal to skills acquired through training supplied no convincing principle for selecting some crafts while leaving others free.

Section III carefully distinguishes uncertain aggregate results from demonstrable changes in opportunity. Continued growth in the number of masters does not prove that regulation had no effect; occupational boundaries redistributed work, sometimes at other trades’ expense. Nor does masters’ dissatisfaction establish failure, since their demands for further protection give them reasons to discount existing benefits. Nevertheless, exempting factories while restricting smaller enterprises disadvantages capable newcomers who lack both the prescribed employment history and enough capital to begin at factory scale.

The strongest indictment concerns apprentices and journeymen. Long periods of poorly paid service delay independence without necessarily providing comprehensive instruction. Increasing division of labour means that workers often learn only a narrow operation, undermining the educational justification for years of compulsory service. Schüller treats these restrictions as class legislation, intensified by the exclusion of craft and domestic workers from important protections available to industrial workers.

His decisive conceptual move is to connect labour protection with the survival of small producers. Ready-made production and putting-out enterprises can mobilize cheap domestic labour on a much larger scale than individual masters can exploit their few assistants. Depressed wages therefore undermine the craft producer’s own earnings:

Der Handwerker selbst ist in erster Linie Arbeiter, und sein Einkommen wird durch den Arbeitslohn der Heimarbeiter sehr stark mitbestimmt.

English translation: The craftsman himself is first and foremost a worker, and his income is very strongly influenced by the wages of domestic workers.

Reports on clothing, footwear, and linen production substantiate this competitive mechanism through evidence of low piece rates, excessive hours, and inadequate subsistence. Improving workers’ conditions is consequently not an external burden imposed on crafts but a prerequisite for their improvement. Better conditions also sustain skills, productive capacity, and consumption.

Section IV gives compulsory associations a more qualified assessment. They can organize placement, arbitration, instruction, credit, supplies, and shared facilities. Yet membership totals do not demonstrate effective activity: most associations combine heterogeneous trades, while collective economic enterprises remain rare. Schüller notes useful exceptions, including the Vienna men’s clothing producers’ educational and assistance institutions. He also exposes the subordinate position assigned to labour:

Die Gehilfen sind nicht Mitglieder, sondern nur „Angehörige“ der Genossenschaft.

English translation: The journeymen are not members, but merely “affiliates” of the association.

Their representatives possess only an advisory voice, and their assemblies depend on the masters’ board. Associations also pursue expanded entry restrictions and finance themselves through apprentice fees. Organizational revival thus contains genuine possibilities while remaining entangled with exclusionary politics.

Section V follows this ambiguity into the government’s 1895 proposals. Majority approval could facilitate shared facilities, but stronger association powers could obstruct entry; proposed apprenticeship rules could penalize young workers even when masters prevented school attendance. Only selected provisions ultimately passed, without parliamentary opposition. Schüller reads this consensus as evidence that public economic regulation had gained legitimacy without acquiring coherent principles:

Es wird nichts mit Entschiedenheit gethan, aber auch nichts entschieden verworfen.

English translation: Nothing is done decisively, but nothing is decisively rejected either.

The article’s relevance lies in its refusal to equate either regulation or liberalization automatically with progress. Its standard is whether institutions improve productive capacity and social conditions. Austrian craft policy fails that test when it sacrifices workers while overlooking how exploited labour elsewhere intensifies competition against the very masters it seeks to protect.