Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen: Review of Two Labour Department Reports (1900)

Schullern’s review examines two British Board of Trade publications of 1899: Miss Collet’s investigation of domestic servants’ wages and a comparative report on governmental provision for old age in European countries. Its two sections combine methodological appraisal with social-policy assessment. The first asks what a pioneering wage survey can reliably establish; the second uses international comparison to expose uneven provision for workers incapacitated by age, particularly Austria’s limited progress.

Domestic service employed approximately 1.8 million women in the United Kingdom, yet its wages remained exceptionally difficult to document. Collet’s inquiry covered 2,067 employers and 5,568 servants across varied households. Schullern finds grounds for trusting its grouped averages because comparable services received broadly similar cash wages when household staffing, locality size, and servants’ ages were held comparable. He sharply limits the inference:

Damit ist thatsächlich die Wahrscheinlichkeit gegeben, dass die für die einzelnen Gruppen gewonnenen Durchschnitte zuverlässig sind; mehr freilich darf nicht gesucht werden und Durchschnittsberechnungen für alle Arten weiblicher Dienstboten zusammen wären unverlässlich; dass sie übrigens auch, wenn verlässlich, wertlos wären, liegt auf der Hand.

English translation: This does in fact establish the probability that the averages obtained for the individual groups are reliable; more, to be sure, may not be sought, and average calculations for all kinds of female domestic servants taken together would be unreliable; that they would moreover, even if reliable, be worthless, is obvious.

The distinction is between meaningful comparison within differentiated groups and an aggregate that would obscure economically important differences. Reliability alone would not make an overall average useful. Schullern also questions the exclusion of payments in kind, often the most important component of remuneration: the commissioner’s justification need not settle the matter. His endorsement therefore remains deliberately qualified:

Der vorliegende erste Versuch einer Lohnstatistik der Dienstboten im Vereinigten Königreich verdient jedenfalls die grösste Beachtung und wird bei ähnlichen spätern Erhebungen im grossen und ganzen zum Muster genommen werden können, obwohl er bisher nur eine mangelhafte Information bietet.

English translation: The present first attempt at a wage statistic of domestic servants in the United Kingdom deserves in any case the greatest attention and will on the whole be able to be taken as a model for similar later inquiries, although thus far it offers only deficient information.

The report’s value lies both in its findings and in its potential to guide later surveys. Incomplete evidence can still constitute a methodological advance.

The second section surveys legislation in eleven European states, noting that Germany, France, and Belgium receive the fullest treatment. Austria offers mainly legislative initiatives, Ebenhoch’s resolution of June 1895, and existing miners’ and registered aid funds. Schullern’s brief intervention makes his reformist concern explicit:

Möge von unserem Vaterlande in nicht ferner Zeit mehr und besseres gesagt werden können!

English translation: May it be possible, in no distant time, for more and better to be said of our own fatherland!

Denmark receives particular emphasis because, alongside Germany, it possesses a unified old-age insurance law, though founded on different principles and financed by municipalities and the state. Elsewhere, Schullern records a patchwork of retirement institutions, mutual-aid funds, and occupational schemes: French and Belgian institutions, Italy’s newly prepared national workers’ fund, Russian coverage restricted to state-mine workers, and a Romanian miners’ insurance law that had remained ineffective. These distinctions give the review its comparative relevance. Legal enactment, institutional scope, financing, and practical effect all matter; the existence of a measure does not by itself establish adequate protection.