Lent Work. A history of debates about loan work during the Federal Republic's early years

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Wagner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491061405

The project explores Leiharbeit (“loan work”) as an example of normative change regarding the labour market in the early Federal Republic as well as its implications for the changing shapes of statehood in the 20th century. It aims to illuminate blind spots of contemporary historical research that take Leiharbeit to enter the historical stage only in the period after the boom. By contrast, this project seeks to spotlight the debates about the various manifestations of Leiharbeit as well as the changing regulations regarding this form of employment (including the state monopoly on labour exchange) through the course of the 20th century with an emphasis on the early Federal Republic. Thereby, the project offers an innovative impulse for the history of labour in general.Preliminary studies about the labour market debates in the Weimar Republic and during National Socialism have shown that during these decades a pejorative representation of Leiharbeit developed that was hardly influenced by the changes of political systems. After the second half of the 1950s had once again seen an increased effort to reduce this form of employment, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by crucial developments and normative changes that are indispensable for understanding the “neoliberal” tendencies of labour market policies after the boom. The project puts a special emphasis on the invention of “Zeit-Arbeit” (temporary work) that took place during these decades and which was conceived of as a counter-model to the pejoratively connotated Leiharbeit. By means of this concept, the protagonists of the recently established temporary work industry were able to paint a new image of their service that was tightly connected to narratives of freedom and self-realisation.By means of publicised as well as archival sources, the project traces the debates dealing with Leiharbeit, reconstructs decision processes, and aims at elucidating the interests of various labour market participants. The project conceives of the protagonists of the temporary work industry as early protagonists of processes of economisation and privatisation in the labour market field. Early on, they began to develop their vision of a more flexible and mobile labour market that eventually became a component of the deregulation efforts of the 1990s and 2000s. The institutionalisation of Leiharbeit as a normal component of the labour market at the end of the boom period was possible, the project claims, because entrepreneurial groups in the service sector got the upper hand in a conflict about what role a modern state is to play in the labour market field. The chief aim of this project is to trace this “conflict of modernity” by the example of Leiharbeit and to thereby enrich the research dealing with statehood in the 20th century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants