Emil Lederer: Review of J. Jastrow’s Arbeiterschutz (1913)

Emil Lederer’s short review assesses the second volume of J. Jastrow’s Textbücher zu Studien über Wirtschaft und Staat, published in Berlin in 1912. Its central judgment is that the selection and arrangement of primary sources make the volume an unusually effective introduction to labour protection for students and practitioners.

Das vorliegende Bändchen ist in ausgezeichneter Weise geeignet, Studierende und Praktiker in die Materie des Arbeiterschutzes tiefer einzuführen, als es bisher möglich war.

English translation: The present little volume is excellently suited to introduce students and practitioners more deeply into the subject of labour protection than has hitherto been possible.

Lederer develops this claim through a sustained account of the book’s contents. Jastrow begins with sources illustrating economic regulation and industrial life before modern protective legislation: the Prussian general code, a wage regulation from 1762, and Goethe’s portrayal of domestic industry by Lake Zurich. The sequence then moves to the English Morals and Health Act, followed by Engels and Kingsley as witnesses to the conditions and pressures behind subsequent legislation. Extracts from the Communist Manifesto and chronological tables place legislative development within a broader historical field. For Lederer, these materials do more than supply background: they awaken interest in problems otherwise obscured by dry and often inadequately formulated legal texts, while making largely unfamiliar sources accessible.

The review particularly values Jastrow’s presentation of the ideas animating legislation:

Auch in den folgenden Partien beschränkt sich der Herausgeber nicht auf die Wiedergabe von Gesetzestexten, sondern vermittelt die leitenden Ideologien der Arbeiterschutzgesetzgebung und sozialpolitischen Strömungen durch Wiedergabe der kaiserlichen Erlasse über Arbeiterpolitik und die Enzyklika Rerum Novarum über die Arbeiterfrage.

English translation: In the following sections too the editor does not confine himself to the reproduction of statutory texts, but conveys the guiding ideologies of labour protection legislation and of the social-political currents by reproducing the imperial decrees on labour policy and the encyclical Rerum Novarum on the labour question.

Labour protection thus becomes intelligible through the conjunction of legal provisions, social conditions, and competing political and religious orientations. Lederer traces the collection’s widening scope through the North German industrial code, the Bern conventions, minimum-wage laws in the English-speaking world, and Swiss provisions on collective agreements. A separate section gathers current German labour-protection law and closes with Jastrow’s essay asking what labour protection is; the third part supplies statistical materials on employers’ and workers’ organizations, international trade unionism, and labour-market reporting.

Ein sehr detailliertes Register ermöglicht es, das Büchlein auch als Nachschlagewerk, nicht nur zu systematischem Studium zu benützen.

English translation: A very detailed index makes it possible to use the little book as a work of reference as well, and not only for systematic study.

This practical feature reinforces the review’s larger methodological judgment. Lederer praises a book that supports both sustained study and targeted consultation, but his strongest endorsement concerns its capacity to lead readers directly to legislation through the selection and grouping of evidence. The closing emphasis falls on professional economists without legal training, who had generally studied these sources only indirectly. The review’s significance lies in this compact argument for historically informed, source-based economic education: editorial arrangement can connect social experience and ideology to the precise legal materials through which labour protection operates.