Abstract
Organising Agricultural Labour. Administrative Struggles in Interwar Austria
Funded by Austrian Science Fund (FWF): 10.55776/P32140
Duration: September 2019 to February 2024
What we understand today as work is relatively new. From the late nineteenth century onwards, vocations in the sense of a learned and continuous means of making a living outside of the home increasingly became the paragon and yardstick for all forms of making a living. This was to a large extent conditioned by administrative authorities, courts, parliaments, and state institutions such as labour offices. They strove to legislate the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved, to regulate occupational training, to develop social securities, or to limit or promote labour migration through new means.
As a result, agricultural employment also changed, in Austria during the interwar period becoming newly regulated from a legal point of view and partly incorporated into social security. However, even among state institutions the question of how the activities of farm hands, agricultural labourers, day labourers, and so forth were to be categorised and regulated remained disputed. While some authorities aimed to incorporate agricultural activities into the administrative measures concerning the commercial labour market, others insisted on the specificity of agricultural labour and thereby on specifically tailored forms of regulation.
This project focusses on disputes and official measures concerning the regulation of agricultural labour. It proceeds from the premise that new forms of agricultural labour organisation emerged as a result of conflicts between various actors including authorities. Such disputes were related to overarching changes in labour generally. The project undertakes a detailed examination of official measures and conflicts and assesses the extent to which the subsequent changes in agricultural labour led to new hierarchisations between labourers. To this end, it will analyze official documentation from the local through to the ministerial levels and from various administrative sectors. It will elucidate similarities and differences between official perspectives and measures as well as changes and impacts on agricultural labour.
Painting: Die Heuernte (Zyklus Arbeit), 1919. Artist: Arthur Segal (1875-1944), Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons