Threepenny strike

The three-penny strike of the book printers in Leipzig from April 1 to June 6, 1865 was an important step on the way to founding the German Association of Book Printers . At the same time, Germany-wide attention to the movement ensured that the strike spread as a means of enforcing interests.

prehistory

The journeyman printing presses can look back on a long solid organizational history. During the revolution of 1848 they were the first professional group, alongside the tobacco workers , in which a union-like organization emerged. Like all comparable approaches, this could not hold up in the reaction era.

After the political situation became less repressive at the beginning of the 1860s, the printers, like the tobacco workers, were one of the first occupational groups in which trade union approaches were again evident. In 1863 the Leipziger Buchdrucker and other local associations merged to form the Mittelrheinischer Buchdruckerverband. The Leipzig advanced training association for book printers published its own association organ with the correspondent. This was later adopted by the all-German union.

Course and consequences

Against this background, there was a strike in Leipzig, in which 500 of the approximately 800 book printers took part. The aim of the strike was higher wages and shorter working hours. Like the printers in Berlin , the Leipzig printers asked for three groschen for every thousand “n” placed. The principals responded by hiring strikebreakers from Bohemia and planning to employ unskilled women as typesetters .

The Buchdruckerfortbildungsverein under Richard Härtel had to behave neutrally because otherwise it would have been threatened with liquidation. For this reason, too, there was initially no financial support for the strike. Leading protagonists of the strikes were sentenced to fourteen days in prison while they were still on strike. The strike was noticed across Germany and triggered a wave of solidarity. Donations came from different parts of the German Confederation . Employees from other sectors also took part.

The liberal-minded publisher Leopold Sonnemann , August Bebel and the lawyer Karl Georg von Wächter wanted to mediate . These attempts failed. Bebel described both parties on the strike as stubborn. The fact that the printers did not make any statements about party politics also played a role in this judgment. The ADAV was also critical of the strike. Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche turned against the allegedly spreading desire to strike, "as this distracts the working class from its actual goal of striving for radical means to improve its situation with all the energy at its disposal".

The book printers ultimately achieved a wage increase to 28 pfennigs. About 50 protagonists of the strike were not re-employed. The course of the strike made clear the necessity of a central Germany-wide organization of book printers. The printers withdrew at least temporarily from the still partly bourgeois influenced VDAV Bebels and thus completed the separation from liberalism and the bourgeois democratic movement .

In 1866, a German Book Printer Day was held in which 84 local associations took part, which together represented 3,000 members. The local clubs initially merged loosely, before a central association was established in 1868 under the direction of Richard Härtel.

The strike served as a model for other professional groups beyond the printers. In the dictionary of the Brothers Grimm , the Leipzig printers' strike marked the beginning of the spread of the strike in Germany.

literature

• August Bebel: From my life . Volume 1. Berlin 1946, p. 104. zeno.org
• Klaus Tenfelde : The emergence of the German trade union movement. In: Ulrich Borsdorf (Hrsg.): History of the German trade unions. Cologne, 1987
• Klaus Tenfelde: On the significance of the labor disputes for the emergence of the German trade unions. In: Solidarity and Human Dignity: Stages in German Trade Union History from the Beginning to the Present . Bonn, 1984, pp. 25-38
• Dieter Schuster: Chronology of the German trade union movement from the beginning to 1918 fes.de

Web links

• Organizational development of the printing union. Verdi
• Brief description of the Karl-Richter-Verein

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hubert Kiesewetter: Industrial Revolution in Germany . Wiesbaden, 2004 p. 100
2. ↑ strike. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 19 : Stob – Strollen - (X, 3rd division). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1957 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).