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Labour mediation among seasonal workers, in particular the Lippe brick makers. 1650-1900
Piet Lourens & Jan Lucassen

Paper for the workshop History of Labour Intermediation. Institutions and Individual Ways of Finding Employment (19th and 20th centuries)
University of Vienna, Department of Social and Economic History, Research Project The Production of Work (POW)
27-28 November 2009

Abstract

How do seasonal workers find a job far away from home? Although a comprehensive theory is missing, it is clear that not only the workers themselves and their prospective employers, but also the authorities in the regions of destination played their respective role. Sometimes also the authorities in the region of departure wanted to have an active say. The German Principality of Lippe-Detmold is a case in point. Famous for its wandering brick makers, Lippe offers a fine example of state intervention on behalf of seasonal workers between the late seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries. On top of this, for the century between c. 1775 and 1875 sufficient sources are available to study also the individual preferences of these brick makers for a specific gang. Based on the reconstruction of biographies and careers of more than 600 seasonal brick makers from Lippe we will try to explain the degree of success of an individual's career on the basis of both structural factors affecting all of them (cooperative subcontracting and the Ziegelbote system) as well as individual factors. The provisional results suggest that in the history of labour intermediation the individual worker, the collectivity of workers and structural conditions in the countries or regions of departure and destination have to be discerned as four interconnected levels of analysis.

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