Lent Work. A history of debates about loan work during the Federal Republic's early years
Final Report Abstract
By example of contract and temporary work, the project described economic practices and normative changes in the field of the labor market (or more precisely: job placement) between the Weimar and the Federal Republic, as well as its implications for the transformation of the German welfare state over the twentieth century. Until recently, contract and temporary work have been rather neglected by German contemporary history and have not been researched on a sufficient empirical basis. From this, a reduction of the topic to the period “after the boom,” i.e. the decades since the mid-1970s, resulted. Therefore, the project aimed at widening of the diachronic perspective and at telling the story of contract and temporary work, hereby focusing on the middle of the twentieth century. In a first phase of the project, a tight connection between the history of job placement and the history of contract and temporary work became visible. Also, it was discovered that labor lawyers had been analyzing work relationships consisting of three parties – amongst which were also contract work relationships – already during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. Further, a rather broad consensus of labor market agents was observed who criticized contract work and tried to prohibit the practice. As the project demonstrated, this consensus was not much affected by the shifts in the political systems in Germany during the middle of the century. Nevertheless, contract work was continuously practiced and tolerated in the more clandestine parts of the German labor market. Regarding this aspect, the project succeeded particularly in documenting and describing a semi-institutionalized system of contract work between large plants of the coal, iron and steel industries as well as the chemical industry on the one hand and smaller construction companies on the other hand. The second phase of the project focused on several changes starting during the “long” 1960s. During this decade, full employment made the lending of workers and employees even more profitable. Also, contract and temporary work were chosen more often by higher skilled workers and employees, too. Transnational companies for temporary work appeared and – together with other entrepreneurial agents – positioned themselves as trailblazer for flexible labor on the German labor market. They conceived of temporary work as “modern” and “respectable” version of contract work and connected it to narratives of “freedom” and “selffulfillment.” These developments were mirrored by the decision of the German Constitutional Court in 1967 to legalize contract and temporary work, despite there was no political will for such a step. The project, therefore, succeeded also in highlighting the agents of the temporary work industry as early protagonists of flexibilization on the German labor market.
