Richard von Strigl’s twenty-page statistical monograph examines the recruitment, employment, and occupational formation of Austria’s younger workforce during the Depression. Its seven sections move from demographic supply and youth unemployment to skilled workers’ qualifications, individual trades, apprenticeships, Viennese salaried employees, educational credentials, and nationwide occupational comparisons. The governing distinction is between the quantity of potential recruits and the quality of the workforce being formed. Declining births do not resolve unemployment when demand remains depressed; prolonged exclusion from work simultaneously damages the skills needed for a future recovery.
Strigl begins by rejecting an inference from shrinking birth cohorts to imminent labour scarcity. Even the reduced numbers entering working life exceed the economy’s capacity to absorb them. Agriculture also constitutes a reserve from which workers could move into urban industry as employment improves:
Jedenfalls ist in aller Deutlichkeit darauf hinzuweisen, daß aus dem Geburtenausfall allein eine fühlbare Entlastung des industriell-gewerblichen Arbeitsmarktes nicht zu erwarten ist.
English translation: In any event, it must be pointed out with complete clarity that an appreciable easing of the industrial and commercial labour market cannot be expected from the birth shortfall alone.
The decisive variable is therefore the scale of economic activity, not simply population replacement. Viennese health-insurance records show employment among those aged up to twenty-five falling from 166,891 in 1928 to 74,411 in 1935 within the principal workers’ insurance fund. Allowing for other funds and existing unemployment, Strigl estimates that at least 100,000–120,000 young people in Vienna were without work in 1935. Apprenticeship provision supplies another measure of exclusion: approximately 40,100 places stood against 73,438 school-leavers in 1931–1935. Many consequently entered an already overcrowded market for unskilled juvenile labour.
The second conceptual move turns unemployment duration into evidence about occupational capacity. Since skill cannot readily be classified and measured directly, Strigl uses employment after apprenticeship as an indirect indicator. Qualification requires continued practice and maturation, not merely completion of formal training:
Der wertvolle qualifizierte Arbeiter ist ja niemals jener, welcher gerade aus der Lehre kommt, sondern erst jener, welcher nach der Lehre in fortdauernder Arbeit seine Qualifikation gehoben hat und als Mensch herangereift ist.
English translation: The valuable skilled worker is never someone who has just completed an apprenticeship, but only someone who, after the apprenticeship, has improved his qualifications through continued work and matured as a person.
His employment-history survey distinguishes work in the learned occupation from employment elsewhere, generally as an unskilled labourer. Across metalworking and several other trades, younger registered unemployed workers have accumulated strikingly little occupational experience. Older groups generally show longer employment histories, although even among the unemployed overall sustained employment is uncommon. The danger is cumulative: inadequate access to work prevents young people from becoming experienced workers, while inactivity erodes what their apprenticeships taught them.
Strigl repeatedly limits the reach of these findings. Employment-office registers omit many unemployed young people, particularly those with the weakest attachment to working life. His sample probably captures relatively better-employed young workers rather than the most excluded. Conversely, it does not establish the employment histories of those currently working. He thus identifies a tendency toward persistent separation between relatively continuously employed workers and a heavily unemployed population without treating the labour market as two completely sealed groups.
Employment outside the learned trade has an ambiguous function. It relieves material hardship and psychological pressure, but may undermine specialized manual abilities. A silversmith doing prolonged earthwork illustrates the possible loss of qualification. Resistance to such occupational descent cannot simply be called unwillingness to work. The apprenticeship section extends this concern to Vienna’s productive future: declining recruitment into precision metalwork, jewellery, piano-making, leatherworking, and other quality crafts threatens capacities that could support renewed prosperity. Informal on-the-job training supplies some additional recruits, but Strigl finds no basis for treating it as a general substitute.
The sections on salaried employees and education complicate any simple hierarchy of occupational security. White-collar unemployment was lower than manual unemployment in the 1934 census, but manual employment was more sensitive to the business cycle. Strigl consequently expects recovery to reduce workers’ unemployment faster, while describing salaried unemployment as more structural. Among registered jobseekers, longer schooling frequently accompanies shorter employment histories:
In vielen Fällen wird eben selbst ein wenig Aussichten eröffnendes Studium der Beschäftigungslosigkeit vorgezogen.
English translation: In many cases, even a course of study offering few prospects is preferred to unemployment.
Education can thus postpone exposure to unemployment without securing suitable work. Yet Strigl acknowledges that graduates enter employment later and that registered jobseekers cannot represent all educational outcomes. He calls for broader investigation of how schooling corresponds to labour demand. Nationwide census comparisons likewise reveal substantial occupational differences: textiles appear comparatively favourable, whereas several metalworking, woodworking, and shoemaking groups show severe unemployment.
The conclusion connects these findings to economic policy:
Es kann nicht genug betont werden, daß die Fragen des Arbeitsmarktes letzten Endes Fragen der Größe des Wirtschaftsvolumens und damit Fragen der Wirtschaftspolitik schlechthin sind.
English translation: It cannot be emphasized enough that labour-market questions are ultimately questions of the scale of economic activity and thus questions of economic policy as such.
Strigl advocates investment arising from economic initiative, expanded international trade, rejection of monetary experiments, lower prices and especially costs, and removal of burdens obstructing additional hiring. His study’s enduring analytical contribution is the connection between present underemployment and future productive capacity: youth unemployment does not merely leave available labour unused; it interrupts the process through which a skilled workforce is reproduced.
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