The production of work. Welfare, labour-market and the disputed boundaries of labour.

Since the late 19th century modern social welfare policy has established social insurances in certain formalized cases of non-work: in case of old age, illness, invalidity, and unemployment. Doing so, it gained importance to control the entitlement to social welfare, national affiliation, willingness or (in- )ability to work. These new regulations of work and non-work also manifested new concepts of work and vocation. Simultaneously and with reference to the new social status of labour and to the new social rights debates on vagrancy, begging and the work-shy relived a new boom. Who should receive help? Who is a threat to the greater public good by refusing labour? Not every way to find income was equally acknowledged as work. There was a variety of activities changeable between work, hunting for a job, non-work, begging and vagrancy. These activities were suspected of being a cover of work-shyness and negative work. Through that they belonged to a disputed sphere at the margins of welfare, labour market and criminality. Within this context unskilled, occasional, seasonal labour were further marginalized and subject of re-definition. The project analyses these disputed boundaries of work. It will focus on Austria 1918-1938, but it aims at an international comparison and will consider relevant developments since the late 19th century, too. The project will study precarious forms of waged labour and non-work within the context of the organisations of labour market, search for employment and job placement. Therefore it is of fundamental importance to include marginal perspectives and practices into the analysis. How did concepts of vocational work and their binding character vary according to age, gender and ethnicity? In which ways were work and non-work defined? How were the distinctions and hierarchies practically implemented? Of particular interest is the tramping of the unemployed and forms of integration, support and control of ramblers being related to it.

In the late 19th century, a new state social policy emerged which did not simply organize, regulate or administer already existing work and labour relations, but rather played a role in bringing new social facts into existence: work (in a new sense), unemployment, and national labour markets. Our project investigated how this new work was implemented and normalized. It did not start out from an ahistorical definition of work but examined struggles over the legitimacy of different ways of making a living. The project did not only investigate state policy, political debates and struggles but also reconstructed the production of work as a combination of manifold practices. It systematically included dominated practices and perspectives of those who tried to make a living by using (and/or avoiding) state administration in various ways. The project showed how vocational employment became a dominant reference for all kinds of livelihoods: it required (and promised) affinity and aptitude, training, sufficient income, stability, career, status and fulfilment. It was tied to social rights and certain legitimate forms of non-work. Yet, such vocational employment was never the only way people did or wanted to make a living. Many womens livelihoods and practices in households are only the most prominent counterexamples. Apart from work, one can find different competing terms in the source materials: vocation, service, earning, livelihood, existence, making ends meet etc. Such practical notions cannot simply be subsumed under work. Different and varying livelihoods which never corresponded to work cannot be understood as anachronistic, marginal or rare. They have to be conceived as a constitutive part of the production of a new type of work, in both consensus and conflict. These livelihood practices were not simply excluded or negated. Rather, they were compared, measured, altered or rejected in reference to standard wage labour. In the process, new hierarchies and differences came into being, altering the entire spectrum of possibilities. Hence, the common idea that work simply narrowed in the late 19th century is far too simple. Our research was focussed on Austria from 1918-1938. In some respects, however, we also considered developments since the 1880s. The project analysed the dimensions of struggles over livelihoods in a variety of closely related areas: state labour intermediation, the labour market and searching for work; various kinds of service; various kinds of non-working (unemployment, vagrancy, work-avoidance) and their consequences; self-employment; music as art, earning or leisure. We systematically constructed a series of structural samples based on administrative sources, autobiographical narratives and other sources. For interpretation, we made use of specific multiple correspondence analysis, a technique of Geometrical Data Analysis