Abstract
AbstractThe decade before the First World War saw a heightened level of social and political conflicts throughout Germany and Austria-Hungary. Strikes in pre-1914 central Europe have largely been examined as part of the development of the workers’ movement, but much less often from the perspective of the employers and government elites. Their strategies to counteract “strike terrorism” included hiring replacement workers through private strikebreaking agents, who provided a variety of services such as recruitment, transportation, housing, and providing “willing workers” with weapons for their self-defense. The discourses around “strike terrorism,” and the repressive strategies to counter it, are a lens through which we can look afresh at some of the most crucial issues in the history of central European empires in the prewar years, namely the structure of violence embedded in social conflicts, migration, growing political antagonism, and fears surrounding social democracy. This article analyzes the public debate around the protection of “willing workers” as well as concrete episodes of antilabor violence in a transnational framework. It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns.
Highlights
IN August 1904, in the midst of a carpenters’ labor dispute in Bremen, an agent came to Prague searching for men to replace the strikers
It offers a reassessment of social conflicts in the period following the 1905 social mobilizations in central Europe, and it explores the circulation of antilabor measures between Germany and Austria-Hungary, their radicalizing impact, and their connections with labor migration patterns
While AustriaHungary has long been considered to have been in permanent crisis due to mounting ethnic tensions, issues associated with the rise of social democracy and the push for democratization played a key role in domestic policy before and after the suffrage reform of 1907.3 The wave of strikes and political protests that took place in many German and Austro-Hungarian cities in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1905 gave renewed urgency to antilabor mobilization
Summary
Over the two decades before the outbreak of the First World War, Germany had become the second destination country for immigration in the world: between 1871 and 1910, the number of foreigners rose from 260,000 to 1.2 million. Throughout this period AustriaHungary was the foremost country of origin of foreign workers in Germany: in 1907, 40 percent of foreigners employed in Germany came from Austria-Hungary, 24 percent from Russia, and 14 percent from Italy (mostly the northern regions). Germany, northern Italy, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, and Russian Poland constituted a closely interdependent labor market, with emigration preponderant in some regions and immigration in others. Lack of information made recruitment easier, as a Catholic priest explained in his diary in 1905: “These people are fetched by unscrupulous agents who promise them high wages while concealing the strike or lockout.”117 The newspapers of the German unions had in 1902 already noticed the positive effect of propaganda efforts among Italian workers in reducing strikebreaking. This strategy was only efficient against “unwitting strikebreakers” but not against the professionals, “the worst elements on earth,” who targeted factories on strike and ransomed the unions by threatening to take on work.118. We will argue that these episodes highlight a new dimension of violence emerging before 1914
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