The Production of a Special Workforce

What we understand by gainful employment today is relatively recent from a historians perspective. With the emergence of welfare states, the enactment of new labour laws and the development of labour market administrations, work itself was fundamentally transformed. Continuous, skilled, and gainful vocations outside the home with clearly defined rights and obligations increasingly became the yardstick for all other ways of earning a living. In the course of this development, some livelihoods lost their recognition as work. Others were (more or less) aligned with such vocational work, e.g. by the introduction of social insurance regulation. Domestic service was one of the latter cases. However, the definition and regulation of gainful work in other peoples houses remained highly controversial. Were domestics subordinate members of the household, part of the family, or labourers like any others? The disputes around this question were not limited to public or political debates or official attempts to intervene in service relationships. Everyone dealing with household services in one or the other way participated. For Austria in the period from about 1880 to 1938, this monograph examines how the many parties involved in these disputes local or state authorities, interest organisations and charities, placement agencies, employers or domestic workers themselves classified, regulated or practiced domestic service in relation to commercial wage labour and other livelihoods. It asks how service changed over time and analyses how domestic and other workers were ranked in relation to each other. In this way, this study differs from previous research. Scholars have scarcely investigated how domestic service was linked to other gainful occupations. Often, they assumed differences between the two but did not examine them in detail. This work draws on diverse materials such as autobiographical accounts, letters, a diary, as well as political publications, official files and certificates, or popular literature. These sources were systematically compared with each other. The study traces a wide variety of actors who helped to shape service in accordance with their social positions and possibilities. It shows that changes to gainful domestic work were linked to changes in work in general: on the one hand, service became more similar to formalised vocations. In the interwar period, for example, the law for the first time regarded domestics as workers, albeit as a special kind of workers. On the other hand, recurring disputes about which activities should be classified as domestic service, agricultural or commercial labour brought about clearer demarcations between the different forms of work. In everyday life, however, all these changes were only partly noticeable.

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