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Categories of Rural Workers in the Late Nineteenth Century

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After confirmation, the son of a rural worker prefers to get hired as a young farmhand or stable boy over living as a hard laborer in the decrepit permanent laborers' quarters and working on the estate fields together with the women for low wages and often poor board. Thus, things have gone so far that agents in Berlin are busy sending proletarian characters, failed young merchants and artisans from the city, to the permanent laborers in the countryside. It is needless to elaborate any further on how worthless these labor forces are, how easily they transplant false Social Democratic doctrines to the country.

Therefore, it is in the interest of the permanent laborers to produce as many children as possible in order to have continuous replacements for hard labor from their own family. But this entails at the same time creating a great number of persons with only questionable prospects for a solid livelihood. [ . . . ]

Finally, the migrant workers or Sachsengänger* are one of the most recent institutions of the rural labor system. Their existence is founded in the peculiarity of the agricultural operation. With the boom in the growing of sugar beets, the demand for labor is disproportionately high in the summer as opposed to the winter. [ . . . ] As a result, quite early on laborers were brought in from Eichsfelde, from the Neumark, and from Silesia for summer work. But the more the sugar beet industry expanded, the greater was the demand for labor, so that nowadays every spring droves of workers migrate to the sugar beet growing regions, only to return to their homes after the harvest. [ . . . ]

The processions of migrant workers usually consist of 50-100 men who converge in the recruitment areas, for instance, in the Warthebruch, under the leadership of a so-called Vorschnitter.** Their object is to carry out the work and harvest operations on the sugar beet fields, usually from early April to late November, according to a contract concluded between the foreman and the sugar beet farmer. Once they are away from home, these foremen normally take on the role of supervisor over the teams of laborers they have recruited. They wield a lot of power over their people, especially if the distribution of work details and the payment of wages is left exclusively to them. [ . . . ]


*Sachsengänger: people living in Bohemia who went to Saxony for seasonal farmwork – trans.
** Foreman for harvest workers – trans.

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