Social Transformation of the Unions

Abstract

One reason why the strategy and organization of the Communist opposition appealed to so many workers in Rhineland-Westphalia was because they disagreed with national union leaders on a series of internal problems facing the unions. Founded in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the free unions had initially been among the most advanced union organizations in the world. At a time when unions in Great Britain, France, and the United States were still highly localized, decentralized, craft-based, and independent of partisan politics, the German free unions, in spite of more severe legal and political restrictions on organizing, created a general network consisting of a relatively small number of national, centralized unions, amalgamated along roughly industrial lines and allied with the SPD, with comparatively few independent, local, or politically autonomous craft unions. However, the industrial transformation of 1895–1914 was so extensive and rapid that, despite attempts to gradually reform their structure, the free unions failed to adapt themselves to the growth and changes in industry. By 1920 the union organization that had been so advanced in the early 1890s could only with difficulty cope with the massive influx of industrial workers who joined the free unions during the last stages of World War I and the 1918–19 revolution. The situation facing the unions was especially problematic in Rhineland-Westphalia, where the number of new members from modern (post-1895) industries was exceptionally large and many of the long-time members in older industries had undergone recent rationalization or economic restructuring.1