Emil Lederer, Rezension: Th. Brauer, Gewerkschaft und Volkswirtschaft (1912)

Lederer’s short review reads Brauer’s book as evidence of a shift within Christian trade unionism: away from redistributive struggle and toward cooperation in expanding production. It proceeds from Brauer’s engagement with Adolf Weber, through the consequences for strikes and workers’ education, to two objections that expose the limits of this productive-cooperation programme.

Although Brauer frequently disputes Weber, Lederer finds that he accepts decisive constraints on union action: the diminishing possibility of lowering production costs and the limits of workers’ productive capacity. These constraints make the requirements of private enterprise the governing standard of union policy:

Für die gewerkschaftliche Politik werden mit der Annahme dieser Prinzipien die Verhältnisse der Privatwirtschaft zum regulierenden Prinzip.

English translation: For trade union policy, with the acceptance of these principles the conditions of the private economy become the regulating principle.

Lederer’s central conceptual move is to distinguish increasing output from changing its distribution. In his reading, Brauer’s programme implicitly abandons the latter by making workers’ gains depend on further productive expansion. This also explains Brauer’s position on strikes. Although retained formally as a last resort, industrial conflict is treated as intrinsically harmful and largely exhausted as a means of securing workers’ demands. Preparedness for struggle remains necessary, but struggle itself loses its positive function.

So wird die gewerkschaftliche Politik mehr auf Steigerung der Produktivität, bessere fachliche Ausbildung, bessere Schulung der Jugend orientiert.

English translation: Trade union policy is thus oriented more toward raising productivity, better vocational training, and better schooling of the young.

Education thus becomes the unions’ principal task, while radicalism appears as the danger to be countered by instruction. Lederer treats this orientation as a transformation of union purpose, not simply an additional service to members. Against Brauer’s optimistic conclusion, he asks how unions could push back limits rooted in technology and technical development, and what means would ensure that productivity gains actually produced higher real wages. Productive cooperation supplies no demonstrated answer to either question.

The review’s final assessment is historically diagnostic. Brauer’s significance lies in making explicit the distance from positions prevailing among the free trade unions—and, Lederer suggests, formerly within Christian unions themselves. Employers’ approving reception reinforces his concern that this shift would strengthen their position. The reference to the recent Ruhr strike grounds that judgment in industrial conflict: the programme’s consequence may be less an assured advance in workers’ welfare than a redistribution of power toward employers.