Room 11

SOCIAL POLICY

The headlong industrial development during the first years of the German empire and the subsequent slump in the business cycle exacerbated the tension between the haves and the millions of have-nots. In view of the large-scale misery and the menace of social revolution stemming from it, the advocates of Christian social teachings and supporters of the Social Policy Association as well as members of the business community warned that the state must initiate appropriate social legislation. Having witnessed the effects of the Paris Commune, Bismarck had formulated his sociopolitical concept as early as 1871: "Accommodate the wishes of the working class through legislation and administration" and "prevent agitation dangerous to the state through bans and penal laws." It was not until he broke with the liberals in 1878, not least within the ministerial bureaucracy, that the government began taking specific action on social policy. The measures introduced at that time were intended primarily as a counterbalance to increased repression under the Socialist Law and were supposed to integrate the workers into the monarchical state without political concessions having to be made.

Undoubtedly, the most important colleague Bismarck had in the field of social policy was Theodor Lohmann. He started by amending the Accident Liability Act of 1871, the crass inadequacy of which was that workers injured in an accident received compensation only if they could prove the owner to have been responsible. However, the chancellor rejected the idea of tightening accident liability and implementing supplementary occupational safety measures. Instead, he directed Lohmann to frame accident insurance legislation that had been recommended in a memorandum by one of the most influential industrial magnates, the cofounder of the Central Association of German Industrialists, Louis Baare. The chancellor's main idea was to have the empire finance the plan. As he told Moritz Busch in June 1881:

The one who can appropriate the money easiest, the state, must take the matter in hand, not as alms but as the right to health care where the good will to work no longer suffices. Why should the person disabled by war or thc civil servant disabled by age be the only ones to have a pension and not the soldier of labor? This matter will force itself through. It has its future. It is possible that our policy will one day fail whcn I am dead, but state socialism will ram its way throngh. Every person who takcs up this idea again will make it to the helm.

But the plan to nationalize the tobacco industry in order to raise the necessary funds met broad resistance in the Reichstag and the public, as did the accident insurance bill. After the victory of opposition parties in the Reichstag elections of October 1881, the chancellor tried to bring the authority of the emperor into play by announcing the continuation and expansion of his social policy program by royal decree. The aim was to contain the disaffection of labor by insuring the unpropertied industrial workers against sickness, accident, disability, and old age, risks to which they were totally exposed. Only by making major concessions did Bismarck manage to push this trail-blazing social policy through against the many objections heard from all quarters, especially the National Liberals.

The Health Insurance Act (Gesetz betreffend die Krankenversicherung der Arbeiter) was passed as early as 1883 because it had been possible to draw on the experience with the auxiliary funds that already existed in many cases. All salary and wage earners employed longer than one week and earning not more than 2,000 Marks a year henceforth had to be insured. One third of the contributions were paid by the employers and two-thirds by the workers. Unlike the company sickness funds, statutory insurance entitled the workers, through their contributions, to benefits regardless of personal conduct and job tenure. The company sickness funds were administratively autonomous.

After years of struggle and the failure of two bills, the Accident Insurance Act (Unfallversicherungsgesetz) was passed in 1884. Henceforth, the casualty of an industrial accident, or that person's survivors, were compensated regardless of whose fault it was. Only the employers were obligated to pay the contributions. The employers in identical or similar lines of industry were grouped into professional associations, which were made the autonomous carriers of accident insurance. According to Lohmann, Bismarck had hoped that this corporate consolidation would give him "a foundation for future popular representation that would become an essential legislative factor in place of, or in addition to, the Reichstag." Be that as it may, a key reason for the effectiveness of accident insurance was that occupational safety and health was improved by preventing accidents instead. This achievement was primarily due to Tonio Bödiker, who became the head of the supreme legal and supervisory institution, the Imperial Insurance Agency. Public interest in these issues climaxed with the Accident Prevention Exhibition of 1889.

The coming of old-age and disability insurance (Gesetz betreffend die Inraliditäts- und Altersversicherung) ultimately dragged on until 1889. Even the official in charge, Heinrich von Boetticher, confessed to having doubts about the justification for old-age pensions: "Whoever is still able to work at the advanced age of seventy years should be grateful to God for this rare fortune and cannot actually demand a pension." The bill was passed by a vote of 185 to 165 only when the miners went on mass strike in May 1889. The law required insurance coverage for all wage and salary earners with an annual income of up to 2,000 Marks. Contrary to Bismarck's intention, the empire did not finance the pensions by itself but contributed only a partial subsidy. Old-age insurance was opposed by the workers as well. Four years after the law went into effect, their criticism was aptly formulated by Ignaz Zadek, a founding member of the Association of Social Democratic Physicians:

And the fact that the worker a black swan has turned seventy years old counts for just as little when it comes to providing him with 33 1/2 pfennigs of retirement pay a day for the rest of his life. One demands proof that he has toiled and payed stamps for at least thirty years, at least forty-seven weeks a year. The very fact that the worker has lived to the age of seventy years truly speaks loudly enough. How else could he live so long except by working his whole life long!

As Lohmann had predicted, Bismarck's blend of repressive policy and government care from above failed in its goal of reconciling the workers with the conservative state

because the actual social discord is not rooted as much in material grievances (the ones bearing the brunt are actually the better-off workers) as in the aspiration for real equality before the law and a share in the achievements of modern culture. Satisfaction can be created for the disaffected circles of workers only if one can give them the feeling of really being on par with the propertied classes (in the right of asscociation and the right of assembly, for example) and, by making proper family life possible (regulation of women's work, night work, Sunday work, and maximum work hours), affording them access to the higher moral enjoyment of life.

Arguing that government interference in the industrial world of work threatened the international competitiveness of German industry, Bismarck resisted to the end all efforts to check the daily attrition of the worker's life and health by legislating occupational safety. The fact that the stream of people leaving the country in the 1880s swelled into the nineteenth century's third great flood of emigration therefore partially reflects the crisis of Bismarck's domestic policies.

Agnete von Specht