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Social Democrats Discuss the State’s Social Insurance Policy (1890)

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Precisely the same friendly feeling towards the Insurance Acts was shown in a very gratifying way at a largely attended meeting of our Electoral Association. True, let me repeat, dissenting voices on the part of those who subscribed entirely to the official social-democratic opinion were not wanting; but the lecturer’s point of view was that of the majority. The long discussion finally narrowed down to an obstinate controversy between the lecturer and his supporters who advocated the government insurance, and the few adherents of the social-democratically conducted free benefit societies. Among the advocates of these was one who defended them ardently because he said it had been his experience in a small manufacturing town in the Erz mountains that the working men representatives on the Board of Directors of the Government Insurance sat in submissive silence before their employers in committee meetings, and allowed themselves to be used for the latter’s profit and advantage, without a word of opposition, like so many dumb beasts. This was vehemently contradicted by some of the members who had served on such mixed committees ever since the acts had gone into operation. They protested that they had never allowed themselves to be so treated, but on the contrary, whenever it had been possible or necessary, that they had advocated the interests of the working men manfully and energetically, and in accordance with genuine social-democratic principles, and always with good results. “If we only approach the bosses in the right way, with reasons, they usually come to see into it, and go with us against their own mates.” “Yes, that’s it,” broke in a clever speaker of long experience; “it has happened that we have voted against payment of damages in some cases, while the bosses have voted for it. But, of course, you have to look into the matter and stick to facts; don’t try to get ahead, but be square. And that’s what the bosses are, at least a great many of them. And that way the acts are a good thing, and you can get a great deal more by them than you can by the free benefit funds of the social democrats. Of course, we have got to try to improve them all the time, and to make them more favourable to us, and we must stick to social-democratic principles, and that we can do. But as things are now, it is only the Government and not the free funds that have any life in them, and they have the future before them; it would be foolishness not to stand by them to the end.” Several others followed him in the same strain. The discussion became so animated that it was not ready to come to an end at midnight, and when the meeting finally broke up, it was renewed on the way home by those who had been especially involved in it, and for a good half-hour I heard it continued, when the disputants’ ways lay no longer together, at the corner of the street where I lived. What I find particularly valuable in this circumstance is, first, the evidence of an actual relation of confidence in a given case between the workmen and their employers, and, second, that social democrats here discussed practical issues and stood for them.



Source of English translation: Paul Göhre, Three Months in a Workshop. A Practical Study. New York: Arno Press, 1972, pp. 132-36.

Original German text printed in Paul Göhre, Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche. Eine praktische Studie. Leipzig: Grunow, 1891, pp. 130-34.

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