Organising Agricultural Labour

Regarded historically, 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, and state institutions such as employment agencies or parliaments, as they strove for example to legislate the rights and responsibilities of the parties involved in labour, 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, competitions, and coalitions between various authorities, which 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 systematically compare official documentation from the local through to the ministerial levels and from various administrative sectors with the help of correspondence analyses. It will thereby elucidate similarities and differences between official perspectives and measures as well as changes and impacts on agricultural labour. Historical research has hitherto not dedicated itself in any systematic way to these questions. This project thus makes a contribution to research into continuities and changes in the organisation of agricultural labour that could also serve to answer to present-day problems (such as the lack of regulation of the employment of harvest hands). Since state interventions in agricultural labour will be regarded not in isolation but in relation to measures concerning commercial labour, this project moreover allows for a better understanding of the history of labour itself.

In Austria, agricultural workers profited from the expansion of labour-related rights and entitlements in the interwar period. However, their inclusion was sketchy and ambivalent. Labour legislation remained vague regarding this line of work. Moreover, the classification and regulation of dependent agricultural work was highly disputed among administrators, politicians, interest groups, employers and farm workers themselves. Was agricultural work a gainful occupation like any other and should it therefore be organised like commercial work? Or did this kind of work require specifically tailored legislation due to its peculiarities, such as its dependence on climate, weather and nature? The struggles over the organisation of agricultural work touched on every aspect of labour relations on farms and of workers' mobility. Studying such disputes has allowed us to better understand how agricultural workers were placed in relation to each other and to other workers. Thus, this research helps to explain how labourers have been assigned different statuses and rights up to today. Agriculture's perceived specific characteristics served as a justification for excluding farm workers from many of the labour movement's achievements. To justify their exclusion from unemployment insurance, for example, politicians, farmers' organisations and administrative authorities would argue that unemployment was unthinkable in agriculture. However, given the vast variety of working arrangements on farms, it was sometimes unclear even to authorities to which occupational category - commercial or agricultural worker - a person belonged. In many cases it was not easy to distinguish between gainful employment for a wage and helping out around the farm for maintenance, or to draw the line between self-employment and dependent employment. Administrative authorities, social insurance institutions, employers or workers thus argued about who should be considered as employed at all. In lengthy procedures, administrative authorities made an effort to categorise workers and assign them social rights and entitlements accordingly. On the one hand, the authorities, but also employers and workers, helped to establish clear boundaries between workers and non-workers and between trade and agriculture. On the other hand, the procedures reinforced the hierarchy between workers according to gender, social and regional origin, citizenship or physical ability to work. Notably, the question of which non-Austrians should have access to the labour market at all was controversial. The labour market administration aimed to centrally control the labour market, with Austrians being privileged over non-citizens. Mobile workers still often circumvented the rules. The authorities, furthermore, largely failed to achieve their goal of balancing labour market supply and demand by placing unemployed workers in agriculture. But they did consolidate the ranking of seasonal workers by nationality: Austrians became more likely to be matched to work opportunities. They received higher wages and better conditions.