Eugen Peter Schwiedland, Die Gewerkschaftsateliers zur Bekämpfung der Heimarbeit (1901)

Schwiedland’s social-policy article examines union-supported communal workshops as a response to the spatial isolation of workers in the putting-out system. Through examples from Switzerland and Vienna, he considers how shared premises might improve health, strengthen wage regulation, and prepare more developed forms of cooperation. His argument distinguishes the practical benefits of collective facilities from the more demanding prospect of independent cooperative production.

The initial intervention concerns the location and organization of work, not necessarily ownership or commercial relations. Workers can share premises, equipment, and expenses while retaining individual dealings with employers. Concentration nevertheless promises to make collective standards practicable:

Nun wird nämlich die Einhaltung einer festen Arbeitszeit und die Durchführung eines festen Lohntarifes seitens der Verlagsarbeiter möglich.

English translation: For now the observance of fixed working hours and the enforcement of a fixed wage tariff on the part of the putting-out workers become possible.

This possibility supplies the workshops’ economic rationale as well as their organizational purpose. A dependable tariff could make the additional expense of maintaining communal premises bearable. Yet Schwiedland’s examples qualify the promise: competition from unorganized workers and those continuing to work at home restricts the enforcement of hours and rates. Zurich’s broader recognition of negotiated wages contrasts with Viennese groups whose ability to maintain schedules fluctuated with business conditions. Collective premises cannot by themselves overcome weak bargaining power.

The article’s immediate policy context is Bern’s decision to support communal workshops. Housing investigations turn home work into a public-health issue, exposing the consequences of combining domestic life and production in inadequate rooms:

Ein Drittel der Wohnungen lag zu ebener Erde unter den Lauben, wo oft des Tages die Lampe brennen muß und über Nacht ½ cm hoher Schimmel auf dem Lederzeug wächst.

English translation: A third of the dwellings lay at ground level beneath the arcades, where the lamp must often burn during the day and where overnight mold half a centimeter high grows on the leatherwork.

Such evidence links workshop reform to housing reform: moving production out of the dwelling could benefit families as well as workers. Schwiedland reconstructs municipal deliberations, union proposals, and employers’ resistance to contributing toward costs. Bern’s September 1900 resolution provided for municipal payment of rent, half the equipment costs, and an advance for the remainder, subject to sanitary premises and twenty participants in each trade. Public approval and supervision accompanied union organization, while access was not to depend on union membership. Since suitable premises had not yet been secured, the resolution represented an institutional opening rather than demonstrated success.

Accounts of Swiss tailoring workshops and Viennese pipe-turning, button-turning, and meerschaum-carving groups show the material work required to sustain cooperation. Schwiedland identifies the source of the initial financial support:

Ihre Kosten haben bisher jeweils die Gewerkschaften der Werkstattarbeiter vorgestellt.

English translation: Their costs have hitherto been advanced in each case by the trade unions of the workshop workers.

Workers subsequently contributed through rents or payments related to output and earnings. Shared services included heating, lighting, machine supplies, technical reading, instruction in drawing, and mutual assistance. The workshop thus offered a setting for learning and solidarity, not merely a healthier workplace.

The meerschaum workers’ experience exposes the limits of coordination. Collective collection and delivery of orders, together with redistribution of work, sought to balance employment and prevent underbidding during slack periods. Administrative constraints, employers’ preference for individual bargaining, deteriorating trade, and declining participation weakened these arrangements. Municipal clothing and footwear orders might stabilize employment, while machinery could raise productivity without imposing the dependence associated with employer-owned workshops. Neither remedy was assured, especially where cheap manual labor remained competitive.

The conclusion distinguishes cooperation in workshop provision from producer cooperatives seeking customers independently. Assistance that required meerschaum workers to adopt the latter form prompted employers to withdraw orders, leading to dissolution and the return of machinery. Schwiedland therefore favors support compatible with continued work for established masters, even while treating independent cooperative production as a possible theoretical culmination. The article’s central tension is between that aspiration and institutional prudence: communal workshops can improve health, skills, and bargaining capacity, but their viability depends on external markets, enforceable tariffs, and assistance that does not undermine their existing source of employment.