Non-state law of the economy. The normative order of industrial relations in the metal industry from the Empire to the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany – a digital source edition

Research Project

The project is part of the joint project “Non-state Law of the Economy: the normative order of industrial relations in the metal industry from the Empire to the early years of the Federal Republic of Germany”. In the source collection, sets of rules are edited that show the normative diversity of the world of labor and how it has changed over time. On the basis of this documentation, the hitherto little-known non-state normative order of industrial relations can be reconstructed for a period of about 100 years. Since November 2025, the collection of all sources that have been processed with TEI XML to date, as well as a repertory of all sources that have been recorded to date, have been available online.

 The collection of sources includes work regulations (Arbeitsordnungen) and collective bargaining agreements. In addition, the repertory lists numerous other sets of rules that illustrate the variety of the normative world of work, such as regulations with a socio-political reference, e.g., statutes of company health insurance funds and pension funds, and statutes of trade unions and employers' associations, statutes of workers' committees, as well as individual agreements between employers and employees, as shown in the example of an apprenticeship contract between the company Wilhelm Marell, Tachometerwerk Leipzig, and its future apprentice Paul Schubert from 1914.

To create the digital edition, we collected the sources in various archives and then optimized them for computer-assisted processing. We worked with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and subsequently manually edit handwritten entries and deletions (as illustrated in Fig. 2). The material was then categorized using selected terms (tags) to enable detailed source analysis.

The aim of making these currently dispersed and not easily available materials accessible in a single collection is to provide a basis for further research by legal, economic and social historians.

Publications