Emil Lederer: Review of Die Tarifverträge im Jahre 1910 (1912)

Emil Lederer’s review examines the Imperial Statistical Office’s report on collective agreements in 1910, published in 1911 with an appendix on bargaining communities in the crafts. Moving from survey methods to the extent and content of agreements, he reads the statistics as evidence that collective bargaining was gaining industrial importance despite employer resistance.

Lederer first emphasizes the expanded questionnaires, which permit closer investigation of union membership, supplementary pay, employment exchanges, and notice periods. Yet the evidence remains uneven: employers supplied sparse and incomplete returns, while workers’ organizations substantially improved both the quantity and usefulness of their reports. Much of the recorded increase in agreements arose from construction-sector settlements reported chiefly by workers. Statistical growth therefore has to be understood alongside changes in reporting.

The report also suggests movement toward nationwide agreements, although local and district arrangements continued to be counted separately. Lederer marks the political contention surrounding this tendency:

(Bekanntlich ist die Entwicklung zum Reichstarif ein sehr heiß umstrittenes Postulat der Unternehmer.)

English translation: (As is well known, the development toward a national collective agreement (Reichstarif) is a hotly contested demand of the employers.)

His central interpretive move is to distinguish the distribution of establishments from that of covered workers. Although small establishments predominated numerically within bargaining communities, a majority of covered persons belonged to communities averaging more than twenty persons per establishment. He draws a qualified inference about the social reach of collective bargaining:

Also ist anzunehmen, daß bereits die Mehrzahl der durch die Tarifvertr. des J. 1910 gebundenen Personen zu Betrieben gehört, die keinen handwerksmäßigen Charakter mehr tragen.

English translation: It is therefore to be assumed that the majority of the persons bound by the collective agreements of the year 1910 already belong to establishments which no longer bear a handicraft character.

The corresponding share rose from 46.8 percent in 1909 to 52.1 percent in 1910. For Lederer, this signals the growing importance of collective agreements beyond craft production and supports his expectation that employers’ associations could not permanently prevent their spread.

The closing survey turns to agreements’ substantive provisions: duration and renewal, working hours, wages, conciliation bodies, employment exchanges, and individual notice periods. Among covered workers, the share working no more than nine and a half hours daily increased, as did the share working fewer than fifty-eight hours weekly. Hourly wage rates also rose, especially in the highest reported category. Lederer stresses the particular value of these wage figures in the absence of systematic official wage statistics, then briefly identifies the crafts appendix. The review’s significance lies in its use of administrative statistics to connect the expanding reach of collective bargaining with industrial organization and changing employment conditions, while retaining attention to the limitations of the returns.