Tobacco Workers Union
The tobacco workers' unions are among the oldest trade union organizations in Germany . The Association of Cigar Workers in Germany was founded in 1848 and was the second oldest trade union in Germany , alongside the organization of book printers . After the ban, the General German Cigar Workers Association was established in 1865 , from which the free trade union German Tobacco Workers Association emerged in 1872 . This was banned in 1878 as a result of the Socialist Law and was able to emerge from 1882 initially under the name of the Travel Support Association of German Tobacco Workers . Tobacco workers' organizations also emerged in the other unions in the direction of the trade . They existed until the unions were broken up shortly after the seizure of power in 1933.
Basics
The cigar production was a free trade from the beginning. The workers had no tradition of an old guild crafts profession. The job didn't require any training, just some skill. One reason for their early merger was to compensate for status deficits and to approach the craft. Initially, cigar production was limited to a few port cities and a few other places. Production spread to other areas only after the establishment of the German Customs Union . In 1836 there were around 15,000 to 20,000 employees in this trade. By 1848 their number was between 25,000 and 30,000. In the beginning, production often took place in comparatively large factories . The tobacco workers earned in the chord in the first half of the 19th century comparatively well.
For a long time, working relationships were therefore not prone to conflict. The formation of support institutions, for example, was usually officially permitted. In 1824 a health insurance company for tobacco workers was founded in Hamburg . A sick drawer was built in Bremen in 1825 . A general support and Viatikum fund was founded in Hamburg in the 1830s. In Leipzig in the 1840s was a sickness and death benefit fund and in Cologne has existed since 1840, a support association.
An important aspect was that the work situation was conducive to organizational formation. There was a lack of machine noise so that communication with one another was possible without any problems. Sometimes readers were employed who also read from oppositional literature. A supra-local union was promoted by the spread of tobacco production in different regions. Migrant tobacco workers were interested in finding comparable support options at a new place of work.
The industry fell into crisis from 1846. This phase of recession lasted until around 1851. This was associated with a hitherto unknown high unemployment. The crisis formed the economic background for the organizational efforts during the revolution of 1848/49 . In addition to the aforementioned support associations, local associations, for example in the form of educational associations, were formed even before the revolution.
Association of Tobacco Workers
In 1848 there were various initiatives to establish supra-regional associations of tobacco workers. These came from Bremen, Hamburg, Mannheim , Heidelberg and Berlin . In an appeal by the Mannheim and Heidelberg tobacco workers, the aim was to improve social conditions.
In September 1848, Wenzel Kohlweck founded the Association of German Cigar Workers in Berlin . There were 13 delegates representing 43 cities. A statute was adopted and a petition addressed to the Frankfurt National Assembly . Kohlweck became president of the organization. Although only 26 years old, he was a good organizer. It was possible to increase the number of members and to give the movement a certain stability. The local organizations had a great deal of autonomy.
Many of the goals were still based on a world of craftsmanship. Others were more in line with union ideas. The regulation of the labor market for tobacco workers was particularly important. One aim was to get employers to employ only organized workers. In addition, they called for a legal ban on child, women's and prison labor to eliminate wage-depressing competition. As in the skilled trades, certificates of proficiency should be introduced and the number of apprentices limited. In addition, collective agreements and minimum wages were demanded. How the goals should be implemented was not clear, however, and the means of the strike were not mentioned. A widows 'and invalids' fund was set up. The establishment of cooperative companies was advocated. In 1849, the United Cigar Workers company was founded in Hamburg. This employed about 50 workers and existed until 1862.
In September 1849 the organization's second congress took place in Leipzig. There were 20 delegates present, representing workers from 77 towns and cities. At that time the organization had about 1500 members. The headquarters of the association was relocated from Berlin to Bremen against the backdrop of the counter-revolution in Prussia . The president was paid a salary. With the Konkordia, the association published its own club magazine. The on-site principle was introduced. After that, the board of a local club also led the entire club. The association also decided at its congress to financially support the General German Workers' Brotherhood. Some time later, the association joined the fraternization, but then separated from it again. Relations later became closer and a cigar worker was a member of the Central Committee of the Workers' Brotherhood.
At its third congress in 1850, representatives from 39 local associations were represented. The assembly decided to dissolve the central organization. Only the widow's and orphan's fund should continue to be run together. This anticipated a ban. The club magazine was also discontinued. Instead, circulars appeared when necessary. In 1851 the Bremen Local Association was dissolved by the Senate . The relief fund had to be dissolved by 1853 as a result of government pressure. At the local level, organizational remnants and the support associations partially continued to exist. The wandering tobacco workers maintained contact with one another. That the contacts were still working became apparent in 1857, when English entrepreneurs failed to recruit German tobacco workers for their businesses on strike.
General German Cigar Workers Association
By 1865 there were about 95,000 employees in the tobacco industry. In early industrialization , the tobacco workers were, alongside the book printers, a quantitatively significant homogeneous group of workers. In the course of the industrial revolution they lost their numerical leadership role to other groups of workers. Once again, economic difficulties in the 1860s favored the formation of organizations.
Since the end of the 1850s, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche began again with efforts to establish an organization in Leipzig . On a Delegiertentag that from 22 to 27 December 1865 in Leipzig Pantheon took place, who was General German Cigarrenarbeiter Club founded. At Fritzsche's instigation, the new organization was strongly unionized and thus the first centrally organized union in Germany. The organization was initially based in Frankfurt am Main , then Leipzig and finally Berlin. Fritzsche also edited the club's newspaper The Ambassador . The Food, Beverages and Catering Union as its successor is the oldest German trade union today.
In 1867 the organization was represented in 67 locations and had 6500 members. Immediately after the formation, there were mostly failed strike movements in many places, which put a heavy strain on the financial strength of the organization. The work stoppages were decided locally and not centrally controlled. A strike to defend against a new factory order in Berlin in 1868 showed how limited the financial strength of the organization was. The strike could only be carried out for a long time with the help of support from other sections of the labor movement and the population.
In addition to the industrial action, the organization founded the German Tobacco Workers Company in 1868 as a productive cooperative. Fritzsche himself took over the management. However, the capital requirement was too high for the financially weak organization. At first the company flourished. But soon there was negligence on the part of the workers and the customers delaying payments. They also produced too much and the excess capacities were difficult to sell. The decline of the company led to high debts of the association but also of Fritzsche himself. For decades, after the daunting example, productive cooperatives no longer played a role in the tobacco workers' movement.
The association was closely associated with the ADAV . The so-called coup d'état by ADAV President Johann Baptist von Schweitzer , who wanted to restore the president's dictatorial powers , sparked conflicts . Fritzsche refused. The majority followed him. But he could not prevent a split. Some of the members formed a section in the General German Workers' Union . The internal dispute led to the resignation of numerous members. The membership, which stood at 8,000 to 10,000 in 1869, fell to just 1,000 in 1871.
German Tobacco Workers Association
Until the end of the socialist law
In the course of the unification of the unions around the ADAV and the SDAP , the two associations were reunited. The new organization was called the German Tobacco Workers Association. In the founding years between 1871 and 1873 there were numerous strikes. This prompted the employers to merge, which later had little effect.
In 1877 the German Tobacco Workers Association had 8,100 members in 200 locations. This made it one of the unions with the largest number of members. However, this only meant a degree of organization of 6 to 8%.
The association was broken up by the Socialist Law of 1878. Fritzsche was expelled from Berlin and founded the magazine Der Wanderer in Leipzig in 1879 . This was also a replacement for the prohibited organization. Wandering cigar workers who had subscribed to Wanderer received wanderer support in places where the magazine had branches. The magazine was banned after just half a year. The unionist took their place . The magazine helped keep the idea of a merger going.
As early as 1881, local tobacco workers' associations were founded again in various places. The call for a central organization was raised in particular from Bremen. In 1882, Wilhelm Fuhse founded a central travel support association. The tobacco workers 'central health and death fund, in which numerous local coffers were absorbed, was co-administered by the tobacco workers' association.
The organ of the association was again called The Unionist . It was later renamed The Tobacco Worker . The editors of the paper or its predecessors included people such as Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, Wilhelm Hasenclever , Wilhelm Liebknecht , Ignaz Auer , Bruno Geiser and Friedrich Geyer . According to the Socialist Law, the newspaper was published by the SPD until 1910 . The attempt to relocate it to the headquarters of the trade union in Bremen and thus to gain more influence on the newspaper failed in particular because of the resistance of Heinrich Meister . The paper was strongly politically oriented. It was not until 1910 that it was divided into a political and a professional-trade union part.
Since the socialist law
In 1884 Hermann Junge took over the chairmanship. The actually strong man, however, was Wilhelm Meister. This was from 1882 to 1905 chairman of the central association committee. He was also known as the Tobacco Worker Bebel . Since 1890 the association was a member of the International Association of Cigar Makers and Tobacco Workers. The number of members was 14,538 in 1890.
After the Socialist Law it was no longer possible to tie the central health and death fund of tobacco workers to the association. The cash register became a competition for the association. The association declared its own fund to be compulsory for its members. The central health and death fund for tobacco workers only lost its importance after the turn of the century.
Between November 1890 and March 1891 there was a large cigar workers' strike in Hamburg. The strikers received financial support from the entire German labor movement. This could not prevent the defeat of the workers. One reason was that the manufacturers had come together to ward off strikes. The defeat meant that the union lost numerous members. The total was 10,684 in 1893.
A structural problem was that production had long since ceased to take place in larger factories and in larger cities, but that it was increasingly carried out in the country and by homeworkers. This made the organization difficult. In addition, the employers joined forces more closely. In 1891/92 the German Tobacco Association was founded as an umbrella organization for employers . In the longer term, this weakened the unions' potential assertiveness. If possible, you avoided direct confrontation with employers. However, this had the consequence that the attraction of the organization waned.
The trade unions tried other ways to assert the interests of the workers. One approach was the so-called label system. The cigars should receive so-called workers' control protection brands. Unbranded cigars from unpopular employers should be boycotted. This approach failed. Another attempt was to set up new productive cooperatives. These played no role as serious competition to the private manufacturers.
The tobacco workers, who were among the pioneers of the labor movement and who had set up a trade union organization early on, only participated to a limited extent in the rise in workers' incomes in the times of high industrialization .
In the past, the tobacco workers union was more politically oriented than other organizations. This became even more pronounced because a fundamental improvement in their situation could apparently not be achieved through trade union but above all through political means. While other trade unions and the general commission of the trade unions in Germany partially separated from the SPD, this was not the case with the tobacco workers to the same extent. When the General Commission claimed social policy competencies and thus penetrated the area claimed by the SPD, the tobacco workers temporarily resigned from the General Commission in 1895.
Another reason for a relatively strong politicization was the tobacco industry's dependence on customs and tax legislation. The government's plans to establish tobacco taxes or a tobacco monopoly met resistance not only from employers but also from the tobacco workers' union. In order to influence customs and tax policy, the political arm of the labor movement was required. Since an increase in taxes on tobacco products affected a mass consumer article, it was relatively easy to mobilize the entire labor movement and in some cases other layers of the population against it. The health risk from smoking, which was already known at the time, played no role for the party. Wilhelm Meister and other leading members of the association such as Karl Deichmann , Friedrich Geyer, Hermann Junge or Gustav Niendorf were also members of the Reichstag , a state parliament or had important functions in the SPD. While the association lost weight within the trade union movement, its leading functionaries were able to maintain an important influence in the party for a long time.
Young remained chairman until 1900. The number of members rose only slowly to 17,811 until 1903. Since 1899 the association was again called the German Tobacco Workers Association. In 1900 Karl Deichmann was elected chairman. Since 1904 the number of members increased significantly. In 1912 they were 37,211. There was a dense network of paying agents. In 1912 there were 483. The degree of organization in 1907 was 14%. The focus was on north-west Germany ( Braunschweig , Bremen, Lippe ) and some Prussian provinces ( Saxony , Hanover , Silesia , Schleswig-Holstein and Brandenburg ).
The size of the association was now small compared to other unions. Therefore, the number of full-time functionaries was also small. It was not until 1900 that the association chairman was paid. In 1911 there were only 11 permanent employees, most of whom were Gauleiter.
A heavy labor dispute broke out in Dresden in 1905, in which 4,000 cigar workers were locked out. In 1907 1000 workers in Gießen were locked out . In 1912, the association merged with the Support Association of German Cigar Sorters.
Deichmann retained the chairmanship until he was elected mayor of Bremen in 1928. Then he was honorary chairman of the association. Ferdinand Hartung followed him . In 1928 there were 436 local administrations. The association had 78,282 members. More than 60,000 of them were women.
literature
- Klaus Tenfelde : The emergence of the German trade union movement. In: Ulrich Borsdorf (Hrsg.): History of the German trade unions. Cologne, 1987 p. 53 f., P. 110 f.
- Wilhelm Heinz Schröder : Workers 'History and Workers' Movement. Industrial work and organizational behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Frankfurt am Main, New York, 1978 pp. 237-253
- Wilhelm Heinz Schröder: Work and organizational behavior of cigar workers in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A contribution to the explanation of the leadership role of cigar workers in the early political labor movement - Work and organizational behavior of cigarette workers in Germany in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. A contribution towards the explanation of the leading role of cigarette workers in the early political labor movement. In: Historical Social Research. The official journal of Quantum and Interquant; an international journal for the application of formal methods to history, Supplement, No. 23, 2011, pp. 195-251
- Alfred Kiel: German Tobacco Workers Association. In: Ludwig Heyde (Hrsg.): International dictionary of trade unions. Vol. 1 Berlin, 1931 pp. 382-384
- Franz Klüss: The oldest German trade union. The organization of tobacco and cigar workers until the Socialist Law was passed. Diss. Heidelberg, 1905 digitized