Schwiedland’s archival and socio-economic study reconstructs disputes over homeworking among Viennese stocking-makers between 1792 and 1801, then traces the trade’s subsequent transformation. Supplementing his earlier account of domestic industry’s origins, it distinguishes employers’ immediate gains from dispersed production from its longer-term consequences for workers and independent masters. Guild regulations, petitions, and administrative decisions reveal how legal classifications shaped economic competition.
The starting point is a change within an existing employment relationship. Journeymen had commonly lived with their employers:
Die ledigen Wirkergesellen — man unterschied Woll- und Seidenwirker — wohnten damals, wenn nach den Verhältnissen zu Beginn unseres Jahrhunderts geurtheilt werden kann, bei den Meistern, wo sie auch die Verpflegung fanden.
English translation: The unmarried journeymen weavers — a distinction was made between wool and silk weavers — lived at that time, if one may judge by the conditions at the beginning of our century, with the masters, where they also received their board.
Under domestic production, masters instead installed frames in journeymen’s homes, supplied yarn, and received unfinished knitted fabric. Schwiedland distinguishes these dependent homeworkers from unauthorized independent producers. The arrangement extended beyond stocking manufacture:
Diese Uebung, Gesellen als Heimarbeiter anzusetzen, war damals in Wien sehr verbreitet.
English translation: This practice of setting journeymen to work as home workers was at that time very widespread in Vienna.
The stocking-makers’ guild nevertheless prohibited homeworking in 1792, and a court decree of 1795 extended prohibition across guild-organized trades. Exemptions and appeals complicated this settlement. Holders of manufacturing privileges enjoyed freedoms denied to guild masters, although their productive arrangements could be comparable. Permission to disperse production thus conferred a competitive advantage through a juridical distinction. Gaps in the surviving records leave some official motives unresolved.
The prohibition remained contested even where it retained force:
Allein auch soweit es Geltung behielt, wurde es von einem Theile der Meisterschaft bekämpft.
English translation: But even so far as it retained validity, it was opposed by a part of the masters.
Petitions by master Johann Bull and married journeymen represented by Johann Dröbinger exposed the practical pressures behind homeworking. Workers emphasized travel to workshops and their families’ need for their presence; employers stressed rents and the space required by multiple frames. By 1801 the factory inspector supported permission with safeguards documenting employment and preserving masters’ ownership of equipment.
Schwiedland acknowledges these savings while questioning their consequences. Reduced requirements for premises and capital enabled masters to expand, but expansion could increase vulnerability to interruptions in sales. Dependence on merchants then threatened to turn independent producers into intermediaries transmitting commercial pressure through wage reductions. Voluntarily extended working hours could become a normal requirement without ensuring adequate earnings. An enlarged workforce likewise intensified competition during downturns. Skill might retard this process but could not remove its structural causes.
Household-wide employment is not a necessary condition of exploitation in this analysis. Stocking journeymen received prepared yarn and returned unfinished fabric without necessarily employing relatives. Schwiedland’s contemporary comparisons instead emphasize costs employers could transfer or avoid, including heating, lighting, equipment, insurance contributions, and taxation.
Divisions within the guild reflected unequal interests. Property owners, silk producers, and small employers had less reason to disperse production than wool producers working in rented premises. Opponents invoked supervision, quality, and apprenticeship. Although officials treated restrictions on expansion as guild jealousy, Schwiedland identifies a substantive competitive problem: cheaper domestic production could undermine workshop employers. Formal freedom to choose did not protect those retaining centralized production.
The 1801 settlement authorized and encouraged homeworking in commercial trades. Its conception of manufacture did not require workers to occupy a common building: supplying materials and marketing dispersed output could constitute factory-like enterprise. Schwiedland consequently separates productive organization from physical location and official labels.
The concluding history tests the promised benefits against later developments. Merchants gained control over sales, while mechanized factories, Saxon imports, rural homeworking, and provincial intermediary workshops intensified competition. Vienna increasingly retained fine and fashionable products, yet low wages and irregular employment persisted. Local domestic knitting largely disappeared, although women continued finishing work at home and merchant dependence could subject whole workshops to a sweating system. Cheapness, flexibility, and contractual freedom could thus weaken both workers and independent producers, while the administrative principles supporting those arrangements outlasted the industry that had prompted them.
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