Wilhelm Wagener

Wilhelm Wagener (born July 22, 1871 in Hamburg , † December 4, 1948 in Kronshagen ) was a German trade union official .

Live and act

Wilhelm Wagener was initially the child of unmarried parents. His father gave a declaration of matrimony when he got married , so that Wilhelm Wagener was legitimized ever since. He attended elementary school and then worked as a housekeeper and packer. Since January 1901 he had Hamburg citizenship . On October 1, 1896, he joined the Hamburg section of the Association of Domestic Servants and Clerks of 1890 , where he promoted tendencies to join forces with other unions. When the Central Association of Trade, Transport and Traffic Workers was founded in December 1896, he became a member of the association. From February 1899 he led the Hamburg-Uhlenhorst district . On behalf of the association, he took part in the Hamburg trade union cartel in early 1900. As a member of the board of the Hamburg section of the Central Association, elected in January 1901, he ran its treasury for several years from 1902. In 1903 the cash balance with around 4850 members was around 70,500 marks.

From 1903 Wagener belonged to the support association of the trade union of the central association of trade, transport and traffic workers in Germany . In the Hamburg local administration of the organization he established contribution rates that were among the highest paid in a German local organization. The resulting high cash balance enabled successful labor disputes in 1904.

Friedrich Himpel , chairman of the Hamburg local association, left Hamburg in 1905 and accepted a post on the central board of the association in Berlin . In the same year Wilhelm Wagener took over the chairmanship of the Hamburg Association, which he held until 1908. During this time the organization gained a lot of popularity and grew by a third. The reasons for this were the union record and several successful labor disputes. By 1908 the central association merged with several local associations. In 1907, Gau 11, which included Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg, Lübeck and Mecklenburg, moved its headquarters from Lübeck to Hamburg. Wilhelm Wagener took over its chairmanship, but did not run for re-election in 1909.

Wagener was a member of the cartel commission of the trade unions, which headed the Hamburg merger of several individual trade unions. From 1906 he took over the office of secretary and from 1907 he had a post as assessor in the executive committee. From 1905 until the end of the Weimar Republic , he attended all trade union days of the Central Association of Trade, Transport and Traffic Workers in Germany . He campaigned for the employees in the Port of Hamburg to unite . The unification of the various associations took place at an extraordinary association day in Hamburg in 1910, in which Wagener participated as a delegate of the German Transport Workers Association . The association grew from 15,000 to around 43,000 members.

During the First World War , Wagener had to do military service from 1915 to 1918. After his return he came into conflict with the association's board after the November Revolution. Wagener took the view that the latter did not separate itself sufficiently from new and radical members from Berlin. Since the board of directors valued Wagener's work very much, they tried to respond to his suggestions and to win him over to work. During the 11th Association Day in Berlin in September 1922, Wagener was elected to the main board of the transport workers' union. Since June of the same year he was also a member of the Provisional Reich Economic Council . Before August 1925 he went back to Hamburg, where he was again Gauleiter.

After the National Socialists came to power, Wagener had to give up all union offices. He spent the following years as an early retiree in Hamburg. In the mid-1940s he went to Kronshagen near Kiel, where he died.

literature

• Angela Graf: Wagener, Wilhelm . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 364-365 .
• Rüdiger Zimmermann : Wagener, Wilhelm (1871 - 1948) in the Biographical Lexicon of the ÖTV and its predecessor organizations, part 196